The Second Tree from The Corner

 "Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted.  “What do you want”” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep formless enduring and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the bars, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of their glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it.  

Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of those things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

Trexler felt invigorated.  Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away."

—E.B. White 

The Swimmers

 

Directed & Screenplay by Sally El-Hosaini

based on the true story of sisters, Sara and Yusra Mardini

TÁR

 

“But there are other kinds of plagues that visit us […]power, true power."

Directed, Produced, Edited by Todd Field, Starring Cate Blanchett

THE WHALE

 "People are incapable of not caring."

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Starring Brendan Fraser

Tobias Wolff

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is. 

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

 

DUNE

Jamis: The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve…but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it. [Ghostly voice: Let go.]

Based on Dune by Frank Herbert / Directed by Denis Villeneuve / Screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth

Produced by Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr.

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac

Cinematography Greig Fraser

Edited by Joe Walker

Music by Hans Zimmer

Production companies Legendary Pictures

What the Thunder Said

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Tree

Trees and their indifferent majesty [...] teaches us how [insignificant we are] and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of a Hedgehog