Hypatia of Alexandria

 Just saw a devastating movie called Agora.  It outlines the death of Hypatia, and more significantly the death of the classic age.  Hypatia was one of the most famous female philosophers and she got caught in the political muddle of Alexandria at a time when religion went haywire.  This was set in 5th century Rome, so Christianity was on the rise and pagans were being slain everywhere.  A Christian paramilitary sect took over the city and corrupted people by using the Bible to make men kill for the glory of God and to make women submissive.  They forced Hypatia to get baptized but she refused.  Just before her execution she finally defeated a bug that had been plaguing her for years, that being the truth of the heliocentric system. 

It started out slow with some atrocious acting, but gradually I got sucked in deeper and deeper until a stellar climax made my heart burst.  I went online and read the true stories of Hypatia and the movie did pretty well in portraying them.  I find myself feeling sorry for her; she was a compassionate, forgiving ascetic living in a world of hate.  I found it even more sad that she died without her heliocentric theory being documented, but that has to occur because there aren't any actual documents suggesting she'd proved it. 

In the film there are some beautiful shots of Alexandria with its famous library and lighthouse.  It makes me want to travel there even more, although with the current Arab revolutions going on I don't think it will be any time soon.  I'm actually pretty psyched about these revolutions because it equates to the ousting of regimes that were put there decades ago by the globalizationist western elite. 

Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

What a sad, sweet, sentimental portrait of the difficulty in pinpointing one's genealogy. After reading the first few chapters I thought I'd need an inhaler from laughing so much, but the frantic psychobabble slowly gave way to a drifting melancholia that darkly overshadowed any starlets left by the Jewish humor. The narrative goes back and forth between Alex's realism of the present- "perfectly" written as disjointed dialogue, and Jonathan's novelistic idealism of the far past. Some of the most memorable passages are during Jonathan's narrative- strange tales like the ones involving Yankel, Brod, the guy that got a blade stuck in his head, and the guy whose dead arm aroused hundreds of women. To me Brod was the heart of the story and her 613 sadnesses all culminated in that unforgettable dream sequence portraying the Nazi invasion of Trachimbrod. On one side it's a very emotional story, but the genealogical paradigm offered some enticing brain candy as well (see below). The book is not all doom and gloom; since it was difficult not to feel any sympathy for these characters, as most of them are intelligent and kind, the more sentimental parts really had a high impact on me. In short, it's a great book with some of the best dialogue I've read. I'd recommend it to people interested in the Holocaust, Jews, or anyone looking for a good drama. 

 

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SPOILER ALERT: I'm quite upended by the idea that Alex and Jonathan could be related as distant cousins. Near the end of the book there's a family tree in which names are replaced by symbolic words that might seem random at first. On second look, in the middle of the tree are the words "I will", which happen to be the last two words of the novel (in grandfather's suicide letter). Inferencing from the tree, it's clear that grandfather is "I will", but it's difficult to distinguish whether or not the generational "ghost" is Augustine, the dead baby in Jonathan's novel, or something completely unrelated. The author writes several passages pertaining to the importance of memory and the difficulty in structuring associations, which is why I find the supposedly random references in that family tree very interesting.