On my way to my bed I picked up a book to read that I should probably have thrown out last year after Phil 1P90, "The Anti-Christ" by Friedrich Nietzsche. I had already read some Spinoza this morning -which wasn't helping my Deistic slant- and Nietzsche's biting, but partially accurate, and always entertaining attack on my religion certainly didn't help.
I'm trying to think about whether I should go through my list of the usual complaints about my life followed by intense self-loathing, or if I should write more about a movie I watched this morning. ...i'll do both, but I'll just list the first part really quick. obese, hopeless, friendless, repressed, degenerate, and lonely => it's all my fault I know, I'm Total Depraved. There. Part 1 done.
So I was watching the rest of the Last Samurai this morning and it was awesome. I think that was the best part of my day. And God do I feel like Tom Cruise/Nathan Algren in that movie. He starts off as an alcoholic haunted by the nightmare of killing innocent indians. Then there's a scene where he is standing in the middle of a battle he shouldn't even be fighting and there are warriors all around him and he's spinning frantically and trying to fend them off with a pointed flag/spear thing. And in the end he gets stabbed a bit and kills people, but his life is spared. He ends up being taken captive by the Samurai and he's beaten and bloodied with nothing at all left to live for, and one of my favourite scenes is when he is knocked down in the Samurai village and one of them pulls out his katana (sword). The guy swings his sword right at Algren/Tom Cruise and Algren just looks him in the eye as the guy stops his sword JUST short of his neck and actually cuts his neck a bit so it's bleeding. But he just is looking up at the guy with no fear of death at all, almost wanting it.
Algren has a kind of change of heart and finds peace in the village and restores his honor and becomes a Samurai kind of - he's like as much of a Samurai as Goyim could become Jews. Like I could be a Proselyte and go to Synagogue but I wouldn't "really" be a Jew. Anyway, aside from Jews not letting me in - back to the movie.
So Algren starts off this really angry guy suffering from Alcohol withdrawl and screaming all night from nightmares, and has no will to live, and everyone in the village hates him and wants to kill him. Anyway, I just feel like I could relate. Though I wish I was in Japan. Lucky Algren.
There are some things Nathan Algren yells as well that I thought were shared sentiments. At one point he screams at Lord Katsumoto (head Samurai dude) "What do you want from me!" to be answered "What do you want for yourself". As well he shouts "What the Hell am I doing here!" and Katsumoto responds by telling him that it is impossible to leave during the winter but "Until that time, you are here". Rather than thinking about why he's there he is to realize he is there and just live through it. (ok you just had to be there to get it)
I'd really like to find some peace and figure out how to become a disciplined and honorable person like the character of Algren becomes. I like one conversation that happens and Algren's insight.
"Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny?
Algren: I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed"
By the end of the movie Algren has come to gain a sort of family with the Samurai and returns to the village to his woman and child (that are the wife and son of a dude he killed). I love the last lines of the movie, and I hope someday I will be able to relate to them:
"And so the days of the Samurai had ended. Nations, like men, it is sometimes said, have their own destiny. As for the American Captain, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he died of his wounds. Others, that he returned to his own country. But I like to think he may have at last found some small measure of peace, that we all seek, and few of us ever find."
