Ending up in a kind of soundlessly
spinning ethereal void as we all must

The tree falling in a forest saying...I never understood this.

Why does something only have meaning if a homosapian experiences it directly? The tree lived, grew old, died, and fell. It may have squished a small insect when it fell. It certainly smooshed a small shrub. Why wouldn't this event have meaning, or even more absurdly, not make a sound?

My point is mearly to point out the blindly human-centric thinking that we are often not even aware of.

"Filed permanently, is my guess. And eventually the files will be lost or forgotten"

Its a question of taste. One might see "providence in the fall of a sparrow". Then, for argument sake, nothing is ever deleted, not even us.

Great post, Roger.

A great work of art that is written down can last as long as one person somewhere loves it a protects it...makes another copy, remembers and performs it, etc...

Music can be remembered and performed and passed down.

Film, not so much. Once the techknowledgy to watch a film is gone (or energy resources too precious to waste on entertainment) how will films endure? For this reason I'm not convinced film can last as long as books, plays, music, even paintings and sculptures.

For someone, anyone, to bear witness to our thoughts, our feelings, our lives.

Ebert: In a movie once it was observed that people get married to gain a witness to each other's lives.

As Dr. Johnson informed Mr. Boswell: "Marriage sir, is a state with few pleasures. Chastity, with none."

I just read The Tempest two days ago. Truly beautiful. Shakespeare has a real and authentic lust for life, a pure understanding of human nature, unmatched in the four hundred years since. (Julie Taymour filmed an adaptation for later this year)

Alonso:

I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.

Ebert: Shakespeare was too good a writer not to realize Prospero's speech was his own farewell to his art. It is so sublime that if Shakespeare wasn't planning to retire, he may have written it, read it, and said to himself, "That's a wrap."

That still leaves me with the question: How could he write so well and so much and for so long and then simply retire?

Michael: agreed with you. For clarification, a tree will fall, but the vibrations caused by it will not turn into audible sound unless interpreted that way by an ear. So, if no one's around, a tree does not make any sound, just vibrations.

Roger,

After reading your post, the only question I have is "Have you come to terms with your mortality yet?" Because these are the kind of things I think of late at night when everything is quiet. Will I be remembered? Will I make an impact? Will something I wrote, I made, I did, exist long after I am gone?

To answer my own question, I'm in my mid-30s and I am nowhere near close to being comfortable with mortality. It scares the hell out of me. The one positive is that particular fear is what drives me to do things I may not normally do, to push myself and to try and leave my mark.

Ebert: That's the spirit.

With my own life ending, I've come to terms. Chaz only told me last October that when I had that unexpected bleeding some days after my first surgery in 2006, I was actually thought to be dead in the ER. It happened while I was still in the hospital, and cold-headed surgeons brought me back and saved me. So I have to look at it this way: Unlike most people, I have been dead, and here I am back again, but if I weren't, that would have been, from my own point of view, and in terms of my own consciousness of self, a non-event. I'm very happy to be alive, yes indeed, but in terms of your question, I can only quote "Gates of Heaven," where the owner of a dead pet says: "Death is for the living and not for the dead so much."

to michael:

what if an inanimate object falls against another inanimate object and no living thing is there to hear it?
does THAT make a sound?

It has been observed that even our precious radio signals begin to break down in the infinite void of space. That guy Yeats was really on to something, was he not?

Ebert: He was.But the title is from Nabokov. It refers to lead pencils. See my entry "Perform a concert in words."

The opposite side of that question is: How much crap on the internet is going to be saved much longer than it should be?

I assume there were a LOT of hack playwrights in Shakespeare's time that we have never read and wouldn't want to read. There were probably Ann Coulter types back then. But now, Ann Coulter, alien probe theorists, etc will live on waaaaaayyyy past their time, to the detriment of mankind.

Ebert: Damn. Every silver lining has a cloud.

That's not original with me. Hold on and I'll look it up.

I'm back. It was Don Marquis. Sorry. don marquis. On the same page, fortuitously, I found another quote by him that I will use in reply to those who blame Nazism on the Theory of Evolution:

"An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it."

I think we have reached a point in humanity that films, music, words in printed form, will not necessarily disappear. We as man have stumbled from oral traditions prior to the written word to the digital age. There may be a point where there are no more caves left to find early man's attempt to record his life, but we damn sure will have a recording of that picture somewhere, be it a dilapidated encyclopedia or some new digital version of the internet.

That is, until the Sun begins to expand, pumping out so much solar radiation that our atmosphere is stripped of all gases enabling biology to survive, or a large meteor blasts into the Earth ejecting dust and ash into the atmosphere to block out the Sun, causing an major ice age wiping out all living creatures or at least humanity.

Or you can think of it this way, too: in 500 years, highly educated fops will be attending an auction for the sole purpose of bidding upon a first edition and autographed copy of "Your Movie Sucks" penned by the eminent movie critic of the last half of the 20th Century (they did not particularly enjoy your reviews from the 21st Century).

Ebert: Those bastards.

I couldn't in good conscience read this post without providing a link to Orson Welles's spine-tingling "Chartres monologue" from F FOR FAKE, which deals with the same existential dilemma. I'd post the full text of the monologue here but I thought of someone reading it off a monitor screen when they could be hearing it in Welles's never-to-be-equaled voice is just unbearable to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksmjh8LL2zA

Near the end is the key line, for Welles and for us all: "Our songs will be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing."

"Why does something only have meaning if a homosapian experiences it directly? The tree lived, grew old, died, and fell. It may have squished a small insect when it fell. It certainly smooshed a small shrub. Why wouldn't this event have meaning, or even more absurdly, not make a sound?"

It's not human-centric, it's consciousness-centric. It's a viewpoint that recognizes that without consciousnesses around to GIVE them meaning, events, objects - anything - may well lack it. Meaning, after all, is an invention of consciousness, a habit of consciousness, something consciousness seeks out even where it might not be. And sound? What is sound if nothing can hear it? After all, what we 'hear' is not what actually is, it's again only a perception of it, filtered through a very complicated aural/mental machine. What we perceive as sound - the things we translate into sound - would presumably still exist without a single hearing creature in the world, but sound would not exist.

Anyway, this entry made me think of a Dorothy Parker book review, which she began thusly: "The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see the lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, 'There - I've done it! I have written the book. Now it and I are famous forever.' Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams. Eventually, he never went anywhere near a bookshop. If he wanted something to read, he either borrowed it or sent for it by mail."

Ebert: I'm more of the Thomas Wolfe school: So many books! So little time!

Reminds me of the History Channel documentary called "Life After People." It wasn't particularly well made, but it made some very interesting observations about how soon the world, robbed of human life, would erase any evidence of our existence. Most evidence of humanity, it seems would be gone within a few hundred years. Even the most permanent records we have kept (disc drives, etc.) would be gone in 500-1000 years. By 5000 years, it's expected that Mount Rushmore is humanity's best hope for continued evidence that we ever even existed. Either way, it wouldn't last much longer than that.

The good news is that the ecosystem in general appears to be much better off with us gone.

Very interesting idea, that.

I wager that if any great films survive the span of generations and are seen or experienced by those so far in the future as to have no direct connection to them, then an actual, authentic "ancient" review of one would be almost as treasured. Like a ancient Roman scroll commenting on the majesty of the pyramids. It would add texture to the world in which the movie was made. At least I'd think it would.

Roger,

Love your blog. I am addicted. You'll get me thinking about stuff I hadn't considered (like buying a rice cooker...).

I am considering how not all words are worth saving. I do not care to be the judge on who stays and who goes, but I certainly hope that your words hang around a lot more than the ones on my facebook account. Speaking of facebook, I'm doing my part to keep your words alive by posting an older review every other day or so because I think your words are worthwhile. Today it is my favorite film, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," and yesterday was your reprinting of your "Secrets & Lies" from rogerebert.com (maybe I'm just into ampersands...). I'm thinking I'll stick with Altman and do "California Split" tomorrow because it's my second favorite Altman film. At any rate, keep writing 'em, Roger, and we'll keep reading 'em and maybe even get another to read 'em as well. And know I think I'll get some Billy Shakespeare on there too.

One day, I think film can become such an obsolete form of art that high schools may start finding it uninteresting (to the younger folk, like poetry or fine art of today) enough to teach in classes (if civilization as we know it is still around at that point). And when they do, I can't think of a way a teacher could teach it without mentioning Roger Ebert.
I can't speak for everybody, but the Balcony Archives, and your review database have been treasured libraries for me, and I believe it to be the same for many other aspiring writers like myself. Gene Siskel died when I was eight and I did not know of him then, but his surviving opinions of film, as your body of work always had, struck a deep impact on my aspirations to write screenplays.
I disagree with you often and repeatedly on certain movies, but I think it is because of your reviews, that I critically examine how and why. Thank you for that.
Someday you will die, and there will be a 10 year old kid somewhere that discovers you six or seven years later with the internet, and to him, you will last forever, as you have with me and many others.

Ebert: I lived in blissful ignorance at 10. I didn't know that Mark Twain was a 19th century author who, besides a few books, wasn't supposed to interest me. I thought Perelman was funny even though I learned about most of his targets through his satires. Richard Halliburton's world travels in "The Book of Marvels" inflamed me, but the grandkids just looked at me funny when I found a copy in an used book store.

i used to write a column for a newsletter for the dept of education for the state of florida, when i had about 20 columns i gathered them and put a book together. i sold it for 12 bucks. i sold 60 copies; they went to 5 states and 3 foreign countries

books are solid, i can hold my book when i can get my fingers to work. theyll be here after im gone.

but will people care about the the thoughts of a person with cerebral palsy after CP has been cured?

Ebert: It's not the cerebral palsy they will care about, but the writer and the writing. It's not what it's about, it's about how it's about it.

Although there is no definite evidence that Shakespeare sought immortality for his plays, he certainly expressed his hope in his sonnets: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rime." Of course he may just have been falling back on poetic convention. Either way, it seems to me too short-sighted.

Sometimes I imagine a future Earth in which human life has long since ended, due to nuclear war or environmental disaster, and what strikes me most is the thought of all the surviving books no one will ever read and all the surviving movies no one will ever see. And even if some extraterrestrial archaeologists come across our planet and start sifting through the remains of our art and culture, there is no guarantee that they will be able to make any sense of it at all, or that they will even want to.

I think of Tuco running through the Confederate cementary to Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold," or of Malvolio and Feste's banter, and I have trouble getting my head around the idea that these will one day be lost forever. I could conclude with Hamlet that "the rest is silence," but instead my thoughts turn, perhaps incongruously, to Blade Runner: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain."

Reading your post, Roger, and seeing that Clarke YouTube video reminded me of his classic short storyThe Star (itself a response to Wells' short story of the same title). I bet you've read it, and I wonder if you identify with the alien civilization it describes, and their response to their own total destruction. I know I do.

I facilitate classes. One of my students just took a trip to Eqypt and told me that there is a Museum in Cairo that is trying to accumulate all the emails ever sent on the internet. Doubting his story, I asked another student of mine, who also took a trip to Eqypt recently and separately from the first student, if she had time to check on this and see if this was true. Upon her return, she told me that she checked with the Museum curator of Cairo and found that this was true. So is it possible that all are words via email on the internet are preserved? And why would anyone want to accumulate all that was ever said? Why would anyone want to keep the email word and also organize them for a filing system?

Intriguing post... what is your connection between the Mandlebrot set and mortality or disappearance? To me that form is more about repetition and symmetries between microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of systems.

There is an artist who worked in the 1960s and 1970s named Robert Smithson, who often discussed his interest in a "geologic time," a scale of events far beyond the scope of the comparatively short era of human civilizations. Many of Smithson's works and writings focused on entropy, that tendency of any system to leak energy over time, to gradually run, as it were, out of steam.

Ebert: I began with teh Nabokov quotation in the title, and looked in Googke Images for "void" adn ":infinity," and foudn gthose Man

http://www.robertsmithson.com/earthworks/asphalt.htm

The internet strikes me as an inherently entropic system: a seemingly endless glut of information that is added to every day, growing and growing completely beyond the scope of any given interface or viewer. Search engines can control this spread somewhat, but even so there is most definitely a reflection in the internet of the general futility and waste of much human linguistic activity, an infinitude of attention-seeking.

That said, there is also a time specific to writing, a time that doesn't have much to do with the life span of a given author. Whether paper or digital, writing will always take time to be received and disseminated. People will be consulting your Great Movies reviews in fifty years. Two hundred? Well, let's hope there are readers around at that point...

Ebert: I began with the Nabokov quotation in the title, then went to Google Images for void and infinity, found those Mandlebrot visualizations, and was astonished that the Mandlebrot Set is actually infinite. I almost wrote the entry on infinity, but I was struck by the Cary Tennis article.

A lost art form was the opening credits of television programs - The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Partridge Family, and so on.

One such show, the enjoyable 1977 newspaper drama Lou Grant, had a wonderful opening sequence - a tree is cut, logs float down the river, rolls of paper are trucked to a newspaper, a newsroom bustles, lowly reporters frown, an editor walks to his desk, a photographer slacks, the newspaper prints, it is thrown from a VW into someone's yard, a man reads over coffee and then finally, he sticks the paper into the bottom of a cage to catch bird droppings.

For me, life is perfectly explained in that two minute montage, bouncing along to the energetic chords of Patrick Williams. Once we accept that everything we create ends up covered in animal crap, true peace will come.

A teacher once told me "People will start forgetting about you five minutes after you're dead". That got me thinking about immortality. When I die, I am fairly convinced that I will be properly mourned. Yet, as time goes on those who knew me will eventually all be dead until I'm just another marble headstone in the cemetary being tended to by a groundskeeper who's great grandparents aren't even born yet.

I know that sounds depressing but that's just the reality of time and mortality. We live in a box of time that opened the day we were born and will close the day we die. Unless we are lucky enough to have lived a life that gives us immortality, having done either great things, infamous things or just something that is memorable. If you've done anything of note, it will be written down somewhere. Someone will know your name. Yes, Roger, you have immortality waiting for you even if you don't want it.

I am fairly convinced that my earthly identity will fade into oblivion. I live comfortably with that. What I try to do is have a better understanding of the world around me. I'm curious about it, I'm curious about it's history and it's people and it's art. I'm curious about places I've never been and people I've never met.

I see history through the window of the movie camera. The cinema expresses attitudes, ideas, culture, how people dress, how they speak, how they live, what they believe and who they are. They are a window on a world and on lifestyles that are long gone.

What will cause Shakespeare's works not to be known? Will it be like Fahrenheit 451, with fanatical types removing them? Will humans just lose interest? Will we destroy ourselves or be destroyed?

Or will the self-absorbed people in the future just create so many words of their own that they crowd out anything said before? There have probably been more written words stored in the last 10 years (with e-mail and blogs and blog responses) than all things written previously in history. God help future historians who have to read through all that.

Sometimes the ephemeral quality of a thing adds to, rather than detracts from, its beauty. Ask Christo, or Andy Goldsworthy.

The words of Shakespeare might seem like they are drifting away from culture but I don't think Shakespeare will every disappear. Years upon years from now, there will be scholars (as there are now) who study a time period in the past. That time period is now. We know historical figures from several thousands of years ago (i.e. Thespus)and years from now, he will still be known. As for the tree falling in the forest, the answer is easier than most people think. It does not make a sound. Sound is defined as "the particular auditory effect produced by a given cause" (Dictionary.com.) If there is no ear, there is no auditory effect. If there is no auditory effect, there is no sound.

Right now I am reading through 10 years of a literary magazine published at the Utica Asylum in the 1840s and 50s. Historian's interest is endless. " Of the making of books there is no end and much study wearies the flesh (quoth the biblical proverb.) As long as there are PhD. students writing dissertations all kinds of things will be read.

"The worthwhile movies will live as long as Plato and Socrates have. I'm particularly aware of that when I watch a silent film. Those faces, these gestures, this assembly of images, all show people who are gone. Yet Buster Keaton can express his life in his art and I can respond to that as if he were still alive and I knew him."

Over a year ago when Heath Ledger died, a friend asked if I was devastated by the news. My reply was, "Not particularly." I meant no disrespect to him-- he was a great actor, but was not someone I knew personally; when my parents die, I will be devastated. I admire Ledger's work in Brokeback Mt. and Dark Knight, and am sorry I will not get to see him in future roles-- to see the actor he would grow into. THAT is a loss that I DO mourn. My friend then asked if I had been devastated by Katharine Hepburn's death (Hepburn was an actor I greatly admired), but again, my reply was, "Not particularly." Hepburn, Tracy, Cary Grant, Bogart, Garland-- they all live for me. All I need do is pop in a DVD, and there they are, in the only way I have ever known any of them-- in their roles on the screen. So it is for me with Shakespeare, and Virgil, and Dante, and now Updike, too. They no longer create new works, but they will live in my mind and life in the works they once created.
Forever is a long time. Think of all that was lost when the Library at Alexandria burned. Ultimately, everything is ephemera, including ourselves.

Thank you again, Roger, for another thought-provoking post. Your blog is a joy.

There are three possibilities, and I don't know which would be most tragic. We could could go extinct, and the works of Shakespeare would sit mouldering in abandoned libraries, unread and unreadable -- even if some other intelligence came along -- until they turned to dust. We could lose them in some catastrophe, maybe a twenty-seventh century equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria, and later generations would look back and wonder what they must have been like. Or we could somehow change as a people until Shakespeare's scenes and sentiments meant nothing to anyone any more.

Before they are completely forgotten they will be performed for a last time.

"How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!"

This a topic I think about often. It is because of this short lifespan of so many electonically stored words that the old technology of book-making wins. Once a book is made, it is readable. As long as the reader knows the language and has eyes, the book can be read. No specialized hardware or software is needed. It won't last forever, but neither will Man. If we move into an era of low technology--which seems likely to me--how much of the literary store held solely on computers and other electronic means will be disappear. Already many tapes from the 70's are not longer readable because the technology for them is gone. Another aspect about books, and one I find compelling, is that the good ones are not just collections of miscellaneous works. Rather a book is the gleaned and sifted, best thinking of a person or persons. It has been sweated over, worked over, repeatedly edited, refined, and set to shine and sparkle. A book is gold to the tin of most transitory writings. As such, it has more value now, and for posterity than, say, blog posts. I used to think, from when I was a boy, that Roger Ebert was just this Chubby movie grump. Since reading his words the last few years, I am wowed by his wisdom and skill in writing. I hope that the best of his writing will be gathered for future generations to enjoy and learn from.

Re: Michael C. Whalen

"Once the techknowledgy to watch a film is gone (or energy resources too precious to waste on entertainment) how will films endure?"

As Mr. Ebert stated above, the worthwhile films will endure. They will endure because they are just as much a work of art as any painting by Van Gogh or any piece by Mozart or novel by Dickens. We are moved by art. It stirs something inside of us when we view it or hear it. Movies are no different.

Mr. Ebert had a post a couple of weeks ago about Elevation. I have had that feeling looking at a piece by Monet and listening to the local symphony play a night of Beethoven or reading Shakespeare. And I've had it watching films by Herzog, Scorcese, Fellini, Godard, Keaton, etc.

You say above that we may run out of resources too precious to waste on "entertainment." Movies can be entertaining (and great entertainment), but I hope that we never view a Herzog or Scorcese picture as merely entertainment. They are works of art that deserve to be preserved alongside the works of every great painter, sculptor, composer, or author. That's why they will endure. Not because they are entertainment but because they are an artform.

"Act as if you make a difference. If infinity is too big for you, live in the day."

Well said my friend. We have never met Roger,but I feel you are a friend,because you have shared your inner thoughts and feelings through your wonderful prose. So, you see, you have made a difference, and for that I am enriched.

Cheers
Gary

Very moving.

Whenever I read something, especially something old, very old, five-hundred-years-and-more old, I always feel an instant connection to the author, a tenuous but viable link spanning the centuries that lay between us.

At a certain point in time, that writer, that individual person, who got up and ate breakfast and washed and yawned like everybody else, chose that particular word to convey that particular meaning, and here I am, way on the other temporal side, being moved by his or her original intentions. He is dead but I am alive, and yet somehow we have connected, and embraced.

Whenever we write, we're essentially lobbing a literary and linguistic baseball up in the air and attempting to hit it ourselves into the heartless, possibly empty outfield of time. If the ball is caught -- somewhere, somewhen, by some anonymous player -- we're rarely, if ever, around to applaud the catch. And as often as we strike out at our own clumsy swings, occasionally we strike true.

Keep lobbing the balls into the air, everyone -- writers and bloggers, commenters and critics. They may not soar forever, these fragile orbs, but sometimes they fly farther and wider and longer than you can possibly imagine.

The consolation for the phenomenon that all washes away with time (or perhaps it is simply another perspective on it) would be the idea that no matter what, we all make an impact of some kind. It's like Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder". A tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it. Whether it makes a noise or not, it leaves an indentation on the ground. That part cannot be changed nor forgotten truly because everything that happens as a result of that is due to this originating action.

So the words we write, whether they last in this form or not, do still make an impact as long as they are read by somebody. Taking your career of film reviews and essays, Roger, would be a good example of that. The reviews themselves may disappear at some unfortunate point. But you have, in your time, changed, affected, and/or broadened the filmic understandings and tastes of those who've read your works. Those people will go on and spread their perspectives on film and art on to those who follow them, be it family or friends. Whether the words themselves remain available to be rediscovered or not, that organic osmosis of ideas is the result of your influence. I'd say the only practical difference is whether you get credit for the impact on our culture. And as far as I'm concerned, credit for the impact is less important as making the impact itself.

Hello Roger,

As a Physics graduate, I am completely fascinated by your words on works forgotten mixed with images of the Mandelbrot set, a finite surface of infinite perimeter. The set inspires a possibility that every piece of information ever obtained by humans could be filed (I like this term) into a single container. Unfortunately, individual pieces would be all but lost amid its surroundings, which stretch on to infinity depending on how deep an outsider wants to delve in their search, a metaphor for the human mind as well.

This example is subsequently used in an argument about whether computers could one day inherit the characteristics of human thought, complexities and flaws intact. The set suggests so, but most, (not all, but most) researchers thoroughly reject this notion claiming that the human brain is far too dynamic for any task-driven machine to even approach. No music program will ever compose Mozart. No word processor will ever write Shakespeare. Until proven otherwise, technology has its limits.

My point? The details about we the people as we are, our thoughts, dreams, imagination and prayer will disappear along with us. However, technological media such as literature, radio, the internet, fine art, and film, are still of great use. They communicate us not only with each other, but also with the unknown universe. The tangible such as books, films, sculptures, etc. will have equal odds at either being spared or destroyed in the long run (i.e. millions of years from now). But anything broadcasted like Radio and the Internet (which work the same way light does) are where I differ from the opinion stated in your first paragraph. Our presence through those particular efforts have physically *no choice* but to be preserved as radiated outbursts to the stars and beyond. Think of that wonderful opening scene in "Contact".

As to whether or not we'll remember our own work years from now when everyone is sitting in their hover chairs as extras for a live-action "WALL-E", I am reminded of a famous quote by fellow Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, as it comforts my worried mind into subtle insight. "The medium is the message". We need only the right eyes and ears.

Thank you for that great piece. Never stop writing, ever.

Your faithful reader,
Josh

Ebert: They will be preserved on their way to the stars, but will they be perceived? What would we do with it if we perceived the internet equivalent from another race? And am I wrong, if would ewe only get one chance to receive it before it continued part us on its journey? I think SETI is searching for repeated signals?

Everything ends, yes.

But not at the same time, right?

Just once, at the end.

Ebert: Depends on how you define everything and end.

How long ago did shakespeare write his works? Do we not still study and interpret them? Is it not also safe to assume that in an equally long time from now the works of time will not also be read and studied?

Somehow, I'm reminded of a documentary called -- Henry Darger: Into the Realms of the Unreal. Darger was a recluse of extraordinary literary output. Darger had no mind for posterity it seems, his life's work left behind in a closet, forgotten by it's author, or abandoned maybe.

Roger,

Will the written word survive? Talk about an existential crisis for us lovers of language. But to tell you the truth, I don't think anyone should worry about what will survive and what won't. I can't see how any product of man, except his pollution maybe, will ever survive. I'm resigned to the fact that humanity won't last forever. Why should anyone think that we as a people can. Humans weren't always around.

All that we can do is "Act as if." That saying reminds me of The Dude in The Big Lebowski saying, "The Dude abides." Let's just live our lives, write, read, do all the things that make us happy while we breathe. Because when we die it won't matter if it lasts anymore; We won't be around to enjoy it.

I would hope that, in many instances, the writing of the words is part of the reward in and of itself. There are many things we write simply so that others will read them, but there are some things we write simply because we feel they have to be said. I find that, on the topics I am most passionate about, I often write out of a sense of obligation.

I find this idea comforting when grappling with these sorts of philosophical questions.

Roger,

I gotta say, I thought "I Think I'm Musing My Mind" was your best, but here you go out-doing yourself once again. Great entry.

I want to draw your attention to your last paragraph, when you said most of your reviews weren't great, but that you were pleased with a few of them. First of all, I'm impressed, whether or not I agree with the star rating, by almost all of your reviews. But I agree with you: a few stand out. Some of them express your more profound insights about our humanity, others show off your clever logic, but my favorite ones express your uncanny ability to understand exactly why the movie worked. These are typically your three-star reviews, but not all. The one in particular that I'm convinced you are (or at least were at the time) pleased with is "Orange County." Here's the first paragraph of your review:

"'Orange County' has the form of a teenage movie, the spirit of an independent comedy, and the subversive zeal of Jack Black, whose grin is the least reassuring since Jack Nicholson. It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience. It will sound like the kind of movie that, if you are over 17, you don't usually go to see. But it isn't."

Couldn't have said it better myself. I know this is not your most intellectually or emotionally stimulating review, but I think any reasonable person, after reading it, would want to go see it. Hm, maybe that's why it made $40,000,000. Though it's not your best, I certainly hope it -- and "Orange County" -- stay around for a while.

Ebert: I know the kind of review you mean. I remember how I felt about "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With." I wrote:

"It is a minor movie, but a big-time minor movie, if you see what I mean. It celebrates its modesty, it becomes our friend, we're surprisingly touched by it even though it doesn't rock us. If there is such a thing as a must-see three-star movie, here it is."

I ran into its director, Jeff Garlin, who said, "That meant more to me than four stars."

I'm sure there are lots of things that we'd do if we knew that the world was going to end tomorrow. For example, you could spend extra time with your children; you could plant that tree; you could write a poem or take a walk in the woods.

But would we ever get around to doing those things if the world wasn't ending? Maybe not. We'd put it off. Life seems to be full of "put-offs". When I was a young college-goer, I made a list of places around the world I'd like to see. Out of the twenty or so countries, I've been to one and I'll be thirty-three this year. "Maybe next year," I tell myself.

My grandmother traveled all over the world before she died and met many interesting people, but then again, she lived her life as if the world were going to end tomorrow.

Ebert: I don't know where you live, but there's usually a country next door.

I think the great works of man will always be stored somewhere, at least as long as he doesn't wipe himself off the face of the planet by some foolishness or other. Man is nothing if not conceited and his history is an important part of that ego. How will he know how he measures up without the aid of historical archives.

Studying history in all forms is enriching to all of us. I don't think film will last forever in its present form but something will replace it and it will be invaluable as a record of the twentieth century.

Look on the bright side though Elvismania will one day come to an end.

Ebert: I can't think of that would replace film as a record of the 20th century. Join it, yes, but to replace it.

I think Elvis will be enjoyed for a very long time. And a lot of jazz. And Ella Fitzgerald.

I just watched the "Soundtrack for the world without Man" video and it was amazing! I want to know if that's on DVD and where I can find it?

Ebert: It was posted YouTube without an artist credited. By tracking down comments on its several YT postings, I found the name David-Alain, but a Goggle search brought me no closer. I hope someone will see and identify it. Or maybe someone will be better at searching than I was.

Haha! I think your ideas are going to around a lot longer than you think. As long as something catastrophic doesn't happen, there's no reason to think that everything on the internet won't be around for a long, long time.

We all know that data can be lost and for political or other nefarious reasons, data can be destroyed; but barring that, why would anything be lost?

My guess is that 2 millennia from now, people will be reading Roger Ebert's reviews of 20th and 21st century movies. Maybe even 22nd century movies, if medicine advances meet my expectations.

Ebert: By then I may be directing.

Will people be able to find tomorrow what you wrote today?

For me, the most frustrating part of the world wide web is the volatile nature of it. I cannot count the number of times I have stumbled upon an interesting story and tried to come back to it later when I had time to read it. Bookmarking it gives the illusion that you can one day find it again, but the reality is far more elusive. Trying to find it can be impossible.

I love the longevity of newspapers. If you pay for a paper, you can set it aside and come back to it. How cool is that?

My beautiful friend Roger,

Having thirty minutes now between me and it, I can say with certainty, the greatest film of all time is 'The Silence' (IB) which I now compare with this (with thirty seconds now between it and I) the greatest meditation of my own personal favorite 'thinker' (?(Karl Barth has been dead for some time)) of our time, Roger Ebert, has given me an expanding perspective of TRUTH. Wow. may I briefly express upon my personal experience of this? My words fail.

I speak with great genuiness and honesty.

As I read through your soliloquy I first remark upon your quote from Luther. I communicate, if you do remember my own thoughts at all in this vast responses of your 'admirers', that I am a Christian, with great admiration of 'reformers'. Luther holds a certain strange, mythic quality to myself, he haunts me, while never quite reaching a level of consciousness. But you mention an oft-quoted thought about planting a tree if one were to receive news of the end of the world. Theology is good when it communicates what is common and universal to the thought of humanity. We are standing at a crossroads. Right now. At this very moment. I feel like I could explode in my thoughts. I feel as if I continue for an eternity. I will end.

Ebert: Bergman stands alone. That whole trilogy is astonishing.

As I understand it, the "fittest" words and ideas survive. With all the words available to everybody, the competition is only going to get more severe, and "lesser" words will fade into data center oblivion, digitally available but not accessed except by machines to index.

In the ultimate sense, matter rearranges into myriad forms, not much linked with tiny perturbations of far-gone states. Beyond certain durations or spaces, it is all noise.

One writes as much for others as for oneself, no, Roger? To delight in writing, to clarify one's thoughts, to express as art.

If the words move and change someone, or a few people infinitesimally, I think they are worth it. Maybe the words will be forgotten, but their impact will continue to circulate.

A film may not be remembered as is, but an act of kindness that it provokes might well echo down into history to make better human beings.

Ebert: This is true. It relates somehow to the theory of memes, a theory I think is self-evident. However, memes require us to look hard at the concept of "the most fit." Memes seem to survive independently of their worth.

I think Elvis will be enjoyed for a very long time. And a lot of jazz. And Ella Fitzgerald.

And the Beatles, I would hope.

I think the films will survive for a substantial amount of the time humans will be on the earth. We continue to love hearing others' voices; we continue to print words on the page; we will continue to splash light onto walls. Do we not seek instruction when we read, view, listen, or interact? Instruction on how to live a life, perhaps.

I count myself among the many that know they're clueless, disoriented, and overwhelmed inhabiting this human body and performing this human life. From a very early point of my memory, and deep into my thirtieth year, I am at times shocked at being alive. As a child, I remember having moments when a voice inside gasped, "Can you believe it, you're here, alive?" and I knew without looking at a mirror that my eyes were wide and my cheeks pale; and into my teens, I would say it out loud: "It's still going on. It's really still happening." I was referring to, well, life. Just the fact of being alive--it was astonishing to me.

As I have sailed through my twenties, I don't put it in quite those same words; it--this astonishment at existence--comes out in other noises and syllables, during experiences of hard-earned satisfaction and deep-slicing failure and highwire gambling on chance; in study, work, love, sex; deep in the morass of psychic immobility and on the wobbly legs of a freedom born in tentative knowledge.

The day that I stop acknowledging my astonishment at simply being here, in this form and this way--and I've had plenty of those days--is the day that I lose some bittersweet knowledge that, I dare contemplate, I was born with. I will have lost some of my original currency.

I'm afraid that I've followed your example of slight digression in your dear, sweet, wonderful note, Roger. What was I originally saying? Oh, yes, I think that humans found a perfect companion in the cinema, the offspring of a fantastic orgy among poetry, music, drama, painting, photograph, science, business, philosophy, and prayer. Drawing on all those mediums, and more, I find that the cinema, at both its most sincere and its most frivolous moments, communicates directly with an astonishment that we all share: "We're here, and this is how we are."

Hi, Roger.

A poetry teacher once taught me that we love a good poem because it says so well what we already think. Perhaps you are sad today, and you found some beautiful melancholy. That's a good thing. Sadness can feel very good, especially when it's shared by someone who speaks of it so well.

All that said, eloquence must be a life style. If you speak as wisely and beautifully as you can all the time, yes much of what you say will be missed. But you will have more chance of making an impact with someone when you connect with them.

Think of the times you have said just the right words at just the right time to someone.

I remember one time I caught a young and impressionable man about to become a hooligan to impress a gangster-style friend and a shallow woman who didn't really care about him, and I pulled him aside and counselled him to be his own man.

Months (years?) later I was in a grocery store, and a young man with full beard and traditional muslim attire walked up to me and thanked me for setting him straight.

I didn't know I really did anything important. I'm not even Muslim. I just saw someone about to make a mistake and do bad things, but the timing was right, and it clicked.

Speaking as wisely as possible always is not penalized by words being lost forever. It is rewarded by words sometimes landing in the right patch and starting a new tree.

For Christmas my girlfriend gave me all your books. I've had them for a couple of months now, and I haven't really opened them yet. I tell her that I always wanted those books, and I'm grateful for them. She worries that she made a mistake buying them, but I assure her that when the time is right I will pick them up and read them.

That your words are there waiting for the right time is what counts.

All words mean so much more if they land at the right time.

Though you never directly address the issue in this post, it seems apparent that you are agnostic, more or less.

If there is some conscious energetic presence beyond life, I fear that everything I've ever written, said, or god forbid done, will find itself etched into a single everlasting moment. The horror.

But I think the overarching sentiment that your post evokes (particularly the Studs Terkel quote) is summed up succinctly in the final line of the Mary Oliver poem When Death Comes:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Thank you for this Roger. I've given this a lot of thought myself, as I've encountered a health bug or two.

Although you mention more about writing, you touch on mortality. I've thought of death ever since I was a young teen, but not in a brooding all too depressing way. Though I'm not dying, I don't fear it (well maybe just a little).

I don't know if this will be of insight to anyone what I'd like to share. We all come from the unknown, we live for a speck in time in our reality, and then reenter the void. But the one thing that gives me solace is that we all share with those dear to us both worlds.

We came from the void. We share time in this life, and then we're all reunited when our ends come (in ways none of us will know).

But like you said. We have to particpate (I couldn't have said it better). The void doesn't end, and neither does the world as we know it. We have to keep things going and try to make things better for those who are coming from the void after us. For our children and for other children.

I don't believe in being remembered. That's vanity for me. Lots of good men and women did what they could for their future generations to live well and are never heard from again. They are no less worthy of our gratitude.

What counts is to make things work and work well for those who you will leave behind.

I reckon this is what Milan Kundera called "the unbearable lightness of being". Now I have to reread the novel. It would almost be worth the effort of learning Czech to read it in the original.

It ought to be possible to estimate—to within maybe three orders of magnitude—the number of words that have been published on the World Wide Web, but if I attempt this today I shall go mad. Sturgeon's Law holds as true as ever: "Ninety percent of everything is [crud]." Let us cherish the ten.

I am convinced that ephemerality itself can sometimes be a source of beauty. I am no great musician, but when there is a piano at hand and the mood strikes me I sit and create sounds that at least I find pleasing. I draw notes from the moment and release them into the ether. Eighty-eight keys, but countless combinations and sequences, and what I play today has never been heard nor will be again. Perhaps one day I will find a recorder and capture them on magnetic tape; my secret fear is that the nonce composition that I find so moving today will tomorrow be bland and pedestrian.

The animation is one of many, carrying the name Animusic. From time to time I encounter these animations by happenstance on my local PBS affiliate, and am always glad. A glance at the company's website indicates that most of the credit should go to Wayne Lytle and Dave Crognale. Someone somewhere knows whether Mr. Crognale's full name is David-Alain.

Ebert: On your hunch, I'm going to add the credit. David-Alain was pretty obscure.

in your article/blog/stuff to which i'm responding, you used the term "bargaining."

i assume you mean stage three
know that you are a hero to many
know that the keyboard is mightier than the sword
and brings tears equally hard

"pity this busy monster, manunkind"

Ebert: I was bargaining only with my digital destiny. At this time I appear to be cancer-free.

But it was very touching for you to leave out the next word of the cummings line.

You should watch Six Feet Under if you ever have the time, Roger. It has tons of intetresting thoughts about death, life, and what we will leave behind.

I imagine that your words, and the words of other famous writers, will last until the human race devises a way to directly download information into our brains, and then we will have no use for the printed word, and it will be lost. Hopefully that does not happen for a very long time.

Great thoughts in this entry. I leave you with a few Six Feet Under quotes.

"If we live our lives the right way then everything we do can become a work of art. "

A group of young american students were meeting with Tarkovsky. One student asked Tarkovsky how he can achieve happiness in life. To this, Tarkovsky got annoyed and replied that Life is not about finding happiness, it is about finding the meaning of our existence. Although Tarkovsky's response might have been of a religious nature, there is an essential truth in it.

The Universe is utterly brutal and indifferent. There is no mercy for the individual. Our feelings have no value. But good or bad, these feelings are all we have and they make us what we are. We all feel that we have the right to exist and indeed we do have that right, so it would appear that it's Us against the Universe.

But this is a flawed perspective. The Universe is not against us, we ARE the Universe. Every person is a tiny piece of the Universe. Our illusion of a self leads us to pursue material desires. There is no self. It's just a useful illusion that comes with being an embodied consciousness. Happiness and Hypocrisy are siblings. There is no such thing as fate or destiny, only randomness. Fate and Destiny are what you get when you look at the world through the veil of vanity. All of humanity's problems can be traced back to this single issue.

The only thing that really matters is the pursuit of knowledge. What is the Universe? What is all this? Where are we? What are we?

Ebert: There is a real possibility that you are right. But try explaining "there is no self" to a man with a hangover.

Roger,

Dawkin's notion of memes fascinates me, but I cannot get past the judgment that meme evolution, putatively via natural selection, is a weak scientific theory. Truth to tell, I don't believe it is a scientific theory because, like ID, I don't see how it can be falsified. It might be true; it might be self-evident; but it is not good science--at least not yet. As you point out, the survival of nonadaptive memes requires all manner of just-so stories.

Please don't misunderstand me. I think memes a useful idea and an interesting way to talk about units of culture and their possible transmission. It just disquiets me when people (not you) throw the term around as if it is a accepted empirical truth.

Cheers,
Dan

One final thought. Your piece also reminds me Spielberg's A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I hold dear because of what I believe is its core message (which was meant to be conveyed by Stanley Kubrick).

Humans, as in the film's story, will not survive. But their best qualities (humanity if you like) will be passed on to their creations. For some reason, that gives me strange comfort.

here i sit, on the internet
a more current current i've yet not met
shelves of bound, pretty, and well-crafted books:
their content is the source of my most content looks
yet 12 hours a day i am here, not there - it's virulent
am i truly content unless the content of the current is current?

"I think SETI is searching for repeated signals?"

That's correct. And so far, no news in the paper yet. SETI also has a subdivision, METI where the "S" for "Search" is replaced by "M" for "Messaging". It's an effort born from the 1974 arecibo message to actively communicate with extraterrestrial life if at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

"And am I wrong, if would we only get one chance to receive it before it continued part us on its journey?"

Think about how we work on Earth. The idea of a broadcast is that it streams a radio emission at a certain frequency for a pre-determined amount of time until the show's over and it's off the air. Sum up all the broadcasts in the world at all of their respective frequencies, and we can assume it to be one long continuous radio emission from the earth at a multitude of frequencies. As an observer from outer space, picking up the signals is the same as tuning your radio. Sufficiently far away, the observer could tune in at this minute and pick up signals from the 30s and continue on listening as though it were live... except delayed by 70 years.
I think it would work the same way for extraterrestrial signals reaching the Earth.

"What would we do with it if we perceived the internet equivalent from another race?"

For starters, we'd recognize it as noise. Years later, when we figure out what it really is, it would likely be like a North American reading Chinese. We know something's there, but what? If however they send anything resembling arecibo, and SETI receives it, we might be onto something big.

"They will be preserved on their way to the stars, but will they be perceived?"

They'd have to ask us what we're up to. Audio will be heard first but is useless without the language. The only hope I have is that they can decipher our video and image signals, which are by now encrypted in digital algorithms making them harder to read. If successful, will they will be perceived? Of course. But will they be perceived correctly? That is something we debate amongst our own works, isn't it?

You know, an amusing insight comes to mind if that were the case. The proverbial tree would be the only one to correctly perceive its own falling. The rest is subject to Rashomon; observers from different points of view. This notion exists even in Physics, Special relativity. The greatest reward for the later human race would be to receive our own preserved radio and internet signals from centuries ago. But how? Don't forget that light, any light can be reflected and redirected. Now that would be something.

I recently experienced a planetarium show where the whole of humanity's influence on the cosmos was represented by an ever expanding sphere of electromagnetic energy that is now roughly 100 light years in radius, roughly the number of years we've been producing radio-wave transmissions. As the view moved further and further away, billions of light years from Earth, the sphere quickly disappeared into the vastness of space. Many scientists believe that most civilizations that develop the means to destroy themselves may last about 200 years, so our expanding sphere may eventually become a sphere within a sphere, about 300 light years thick, slowly moving along space-time. What are the chances this thin whisper of our existence will intersect with another advanced civilization at the same time they have the means to detect it? Probably close to none...

I know there are those who take comfort in the idea that the whole cosmos was created for us insignificant humans...to me, there is no cosmic meaning to our lives, humanity is insignificant to the universe...but life is very meaningful to us and those around us that we love, surely that's enough?

The thing I enjoy about your movie reviews is reflected in your columns. You write about life, not the movies. Your reviews are about how well you believe life is reflected in these movies. The lessons in these movies are provided by you and expanded upon. There is no barrier between art and real life in this way. A good movie is an extension of life, because it might as well be real.

In this same way, your reviews are an extension of your own life philosophy, which is presented more directly in your blog. This entry could have been a movie review. It is a meditation on an idea and on life. That's what a movie is to me.

I find that the people I enjoy most are those who, no matter what they are doing, are meditating on life. You in your reviews, Arthur C. Clarke in his books; My high school Lit. teacher teaching us about The Hustler and Death of a Salesman.

Here is an excerpt from Eudora Welty's book, The Optimist's Daughter, which will remain with me and demonstrates the true occupation of craftsmen like you at the height of their work.

"In the early morning, from the next mountain, from one stillness to another, traveled the sound of a blow, then behind it its echo, then another blow, then the echo, then a shouting and the shouting falling back on itself. On it went.

'Mother, what are they doing?' Laurel asked.

'It's just an old man chopping wood,' said the boys.

'He's praying,' said her mother."

Your work is just as important to me as Shakespeare's. I enjoy it immensely, and it elevates me.

Ebert: I didn't bring up Shakespeare in order to be mentioned with him.

Senator, I know Shakespeare, and I'm no Shakespeare.

It is interesting that you choose fractals as a metaphor for the infinite. The very best mathematics often feels to me like a kind of love note from eternity. Then I realize there are infinitely many true theorems, just as there are infinitely many English sentences, and so my loving any one in particular is not so different from loving a particularly moving poem. Although every theorem is eternally true, it might be that alien minds - if they exist - would not care in the slightest about conclusions from our particularly treasured axioms. Or perhaps to them a fractal like the Mandelbrot set is elementary while triangles and circles seem infinitely complex. But unlike a poem, a single theorem might be discovered independently many times by people separated by oceans and epochs. Some mathematics, such as the Pythagorean theorem, are so often discovered that I wonder if they are somehow fundamental to the inner workings of our minds. And so I conclude that I'm brushing not so much with eternity as I am with that particular corner of the logical universe that invites human understanding. And it is enough.

Ebert: Do you think there is an infinite number of grammatical English sentences? My guess: A very many indeed, but not infinite.

What about those great writings (or songs, movies, etc.) posted on the internet that may be considered great in a few generations, but not now? (like Emily Dickinson?)

Ebert: How would you go about, right now, finding a neglected Emily Dickinson on the internet of 10 years ago?

Paper abides. The invaluable journals of James Boswell (1740-1795) were discovered only in 1920. Hidden in a desk in the ancestral castle, I believe.

To read Boswell's London Journal, first published in 1950, is to meet a very human, delightful and touching man.

"We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet."

I like that. I'm going to remember that one.

You didn't go into it, but your topic also touches on the problem of digitized libraries. (A subject not nearly so profound, but bear with me.) Part of the reson we have Shakespeare is that there were prompt scripts and quartos. So too all the others; somebody wrote down "Beowulf." Somebody carved Nefertiti's face in stone. The bust of Nefertiti, like some of the literature that has come down to us, was for a long time buried and forgotten. She had completely vanished from man's knowledge by the time of Helen of Troy, only to be found again in the twentieth century. Had her data been relegated to a hard drive, we never would have recovered her. (I defy you to extract anything from a 5 1/2" floppy disk. Go ahead, try.)

Digital formats become obsolete with terrifying speed. So, if you've written anything that you want to last, better get it printed. Publishers these days are jumping on the ebook bandwagon, oblivious to the problem of long-term preservation. An ebook won't last 50 years, let alone 500.

Ebert: I looked at the description of the Kindle 2.0 and want nothing to do with it. I still have books I got as a child. I have discs from 10 years ago I can't open. We're risking an information wipe-out. I hope Google has everything backup up. I was thinking Iceland might be a safe place.

I write to feel how similar we all are, and how unique at the same time. It is so strange that every human being has the same basic needs, experiences, emotions, thoughts, yet there is always something however small, a unique color. I think that is beautiful.

I don't believe words disappear. They linger in our shared consciousness, they might even find their way into our genes. Nearly every community has similar stories, and different ways to tell them. Your words leak into my conversations with friends, I know they become part of other people's thoughts and words too when they think of certain movies.

Isn't there something magical about finding the right word for the right "thing"? Ancient people of Middle East believed that the one who knows the true name of the matter, rules it. Just like the emotion elevation :)

does it not always come back to the classic, "the unexamined life is not worth living"

you are right, over time many great works get lost. although not the same as written words, i move to the analogy of extinction/evolution. those that are strong enough evolve, grow, and stand on the shoulders of the past. If shakespeare's writings disappeared today, we would still have your writings, which are better for knowing shakespeare's, as those who know your writings will be all the better for it.

Ebert: Shakespeare has contributed to the richness of countless lives. Me, not so much.

You know, there's the delusion that if you create something great, that you will live on threw that work. This is sadly not the case. You mention Shakespear, but as familiar as his name is, no one knows who he is. Sure, we know that SOME guy named William made a bunch of great plays and sonnets, but no one really knows who this guy was. If Shakespear ever entered a writting or English coarse, not one head would look twice, save maybe to wonder what's up with his funky choice in clothes.

While getting fitted for Tuxedo's for a friend's wedding, I spoke to a 15 yr old kid who had no idea who KRS 1 was. This was jaw-dropping travesty, especially since this kid was into hip-hop. Sure, krs 1 had not been big since the early 90's, but he widely considered one of the greatest rap artists of all time. But for all his accomplishments, this generation hasn't so much as heard of a great pioneer of the music they listen to.

But it goes round and round. How many people are there that don't even listen to or care about rap in the first place? How many great artists in music or art or film or literature suffer the same fate? What makes this really sad, is that KRS 1 is still alive, and only in his 40's.

I've often also felt the same way about i-net message boards. How many posts and arguments, long-winded discussions, and flame wars that I've participated in, are completely erased from everyone's memory, included mine?

It's a secret shame of mine that I guess I'll reveal...but I've often felt the same way about posting here. The fun of responding to a blog of a legendary Pulitzer Prize winning film critic isn't responding, but getting a response. How often have I wasted time scrolling through endless responses just to if my post was found worthy of a response only to find that nothing's been ignored. Was the post not clever of insightful enough? Did I repeated something already been said?

My words then, go off into the void, and I wait for the blog entry, where this time, my post will make a difference. This time, this post will be acknowledged. Maybe I'll ask a question. Sometimes he'll oblige with an answer. Just get a response, no matter what it takes. So I read through the blog, often finding it interesting, sometimes not. I make a response. I proof-read it. Hit submit. Wait till the next day. Wake up. Breakfast. Work. I don't check the blog earlier, because I'm too cool to worry about what some guy with an opinion thinks of something I've said regarding his opinion. I have pride.
So I get home. Check the internet. I look at Yahoo for the latest unimportant news. Check the Blog. Scroll through endless posters who responded that day and skip all not bearing my name.
My name. A response---
It's a short one. But a response nonetheless. a celebrity blogger responded to ME. I scroll down. a MUCH longer response, which include the words "you're a great writter," and "great point".

My blog entry which finally got the response I've so been longing for is forgetten simply because it's upstaged by a better one. My words, this time with a resonse, go into the void.

But my experience is undoubtedly universal. Replace my longing for a response, with someone elses longing to make everyone in the room laugh with a joke, but fail. Or some kid's sad attempt to make into the cool crowd out school, who's selfless acts of buying lunch and paying for archades are not not even a faint memory. On and on. The once stunning supermodel, who not yet fiftey, is far too old to to ever dream of not paying her bills without uttering how amazingly low priced this watcha-callit is.

Solomon, as he is about to relinquish the sum total of his immense and vast wisdom, starts the book of Eccliastes:

"Meaningless. Everything is meaningless."

Ebert: Solomon should have realized that would have worked better as an ending.

I read every comment, and greatly admire many, many that I don't have time to respond to. But hey, Ken? This blog just passed 1,850,000 hits. I'm not the only one here reading you. And you're not here because I'm a "celebrity." You're here, I suspect, because the comment threads aren't meaningless drivel. I don't even get cruddy comments any more, possibly because the Cruddy Comment Writers scroll down these threads and get discouraged.

One suggestion. Try out your spell-checker. People often tell me about typos in my entries, because I don't go through a copy editor but post them myself. Happens to us all.

Feeling the need to participate in human society is what everyone does, but I'd like to think that most people die without contributing as much as they'd like. Why we write and contribute is beyond any rational reasoning, even that of Shakespeare, but I think the goal of most people is to leave their mark. A movie that's made is good, but a movie worth remembering is a success, and the people who made that movie can essentially die in peace.

I'm an unmotivated political science major at a tiny university in FL. I've yet to know anything about the "outside" world at my ripe young age, but I know that I'd like to leave it as a legacy worth remembering.

The problem is, there are very, very few people who can actually do that. For the other 99.999999% of us, we'll have to rot in the ground never having our paragraph, or even an asterisk in the history books. We can work until we're blue in the face, but the white collars are nothing but pedestals to those in the upper echelons who have their own chance of becoming a world hero.

But in the end, who cares? God, I guess. I'd rather live a happy life and die an unknown than to work my butt off trying to reserve my line in World Book, or become the first topic when people google search my name. Perhaps knowing that we helped someone become a known as an unknown is all we need to die happy. No one remembers the PAs and grips' names in Star Wars, but damned if you don't know the name of George Lucas, who wouldn't even be worth a Myspace account if it wasn't for his team.

Hell, I don't know if that made sense, but your blog has the effect of bringing out the weird philosophical me. And I hate reading.

Ebert: But you don't hate writing. If you can live a happy life, you will have made other people happy. Hitler is a man who made his mark.

Your pen races ever more freely, with your Reviews an enduring background score. You not only enticed me to view the Reader, your review mercifully did the thinking about it for me ( very well I acknowledge} and I can move on. And thank you once again I am on line early morning with a bus to catch.

Apropos the new entry.

There are facts and there are beliefs-I think you tend to mix the two. (Not pontification,just conciseness). There are correct facts (evolution) and wrong ones( creationism). Similarly, beliefs can be creative or destructive of value. Just an opinion--beliefs are more imprtant than facts.

Ofcourse ,we are "second hand"---we are the peak of a pyramid of which the base is our ancestors and fellow men---plus a little more we add through our thoughts words and deeds. The milk which the baby sucks is also second hand. Evolution is not just physical.

The questions are the eternal ones---who am I, where did I come from, where am I going? The answers vary.

More than the endurance of ones ouvres( which is narcisstic if not petty} I think the question behind your new entry is the value of a human life . Are we specks of nothingness , or do we partake of something "divine" ?

The great and mysterious bard at one points felt we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys. Another viewpoint worthy of consideration is "a robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage."

Nichiren Daishonin (1222--1281) stated most unequivocally that the value of a single human life is worth all the treasures of the universe and each nanosecond of our lives is worth an eternity.
Everything is in the now---heaven, hell, eternity,life after death.(I'm glad you are familiar with Elizabeth Kubler Ross, though to my surprise and dissapointment she believes(d) in ghosts.)

Once again, I salute you as a person who has long loved the movies. Your work in this field touches transcendance and eternity and may it continue long years. You gave me something where movies are concerned and you introduced me to three great writers--Mark Twain, F Scott Fitzgerald and Carmac McCarthy, at least a passage from each. What is going to happen in a hundred billion years is not a problem for us mere mortals(which we must proudly remain, men and proud sons of men even if we happen to be immortal.)The here and now is too important. Review on ! The Film is here to stay,with a role to play.

Ebert: I don't know where you live, but there's usually a country next door.

I live on Easter Island...so there!

Ebert: James Thurber once drew a cartoon of a fencer cutting off another fencer's head. The caption was:

Touche!

I feel compelled to offer one of my favorite movie quotes: "get busy living, or get busy dying." I said that to my Mom once, but I'm not sure it was appreciated.

Oh, and reading you for years has definitely enriched my life. You have been like a friend who never knew me, but a friend nonetheless. After a movie, I always wanted to see what you thought of it, and it always enriched my experience, even (especially?) when you disagreed with me. You are a national treasure, Roger.

I have pondered this question over many times. I wonder what evolutionary value does knowledge of your own mortality hold. Does it hold any at all? Or did we get too intelligent for our own good? There is probably a fine line between staying fruitful and going mad. And the people who ponder on that question too much probably choose the latter. Because they do see the ultimate truth. And that is the indifferent silent void of space.

Your essay reminds me of that Isaac Asimov story ‘Nightfall’ where the inhabitants of a planet never saw night in their lives, because they had three stars in their sky. But once when night did come, the grandeur of the cosmos shocked them into madness.

For all our confident posturing, we are perhaps at our best in our limited illusions. Limited only.

That is why humanity invented religion – to not to come to terms with this basic truth.

Albert Camus said – “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Shakespeare was one of a kind, but don't forget Cervantes. There is a recent translation that came out I think a few years ago.

"Open your eyes, my beloved country, and see that your son Sancho Panza has come back to you, if not very rich, at least well-flogged. Open your arms and receive as well your son Don Quixote, who, though he returns conquered by another, returns the conqueror of himself; and, as he has told me, that is the greatest conquest anyone can desire."

You've no doubt seen this animation, or something like it, on viewing the universe by powers of ten...

Like you, Roger, I think death is probably the last stop. Perhaps like you, I believe that some day, perhaps not too many centuries from now, the world can be made almost entirely peaceful, its humans highly educated and living in a harmonious, sustainable balance with nature. There won't be much to do, apart from keeping up the monorail repairs and playing soccer (and farming, of course).

They'll have to terraform and colonize Mars to keep themselves from starting a world war for the mere fun of it, which will take a few centuries, and I haven't the faintest what comes after that, or how they'll avoid extinction when the sun swells and cooks the solar system. But that'll be their problem.

Our job is to nudge humanity, however modestly and subtly we individually can, to attaining that peaceful and sustainable Earth. (And, once there, they'll probably become ravenous for historical dramas, for exciting, torrid tales from the Good, Bad Old Days. Macbeth and Hitchcock will never go out of style.)

Forests can be re-grown, and human population can be peacefully and cooperatively reduced. All we have to avoid is the nightmare of civilizational collapse, a new Dark Ages to delay this planetary utopia by another epoch. Ancient Athens had something resembling a democracy, and a Roman built a steam engine. The greatest tragedy of human history is that these wonders were largely forgotten, to the regression of the species, for more than a thousand years. We must not let that happen again.

Surely this is purpose enough to get us out of bed and to work, even as we gradually shed the dubious comforts of the contemporary myths we politely term "religions"?

It's always been rather intriguing to me how well film can survive the weathers of time. I don't mean it's physical survival so much as it's artistic integrity. Sure, films can be recut, but their messages can not truly be altered. Content can only be removed, but somewhere, the original remains. Quite a bit of the ancient literature that we come into contact with is hardly original manuscript. Holy books are edited and retranslated to the point of being unrecognizable. In essence many works become a product of their fans, not of the original author. Part of me finds comfort in thinking that someone living 100 years from now will be able to watch the same movie, scene for scene, that I can watch now.

Now to the issue at hand; fortunately for you Mr. Ebert, your words will live on through the choices of your fans. You sift through films and review them, because many of us do not have the time to do so. Because of you, many discover films that they would have never even heard of. A few of these people go on to do extraordinary things; perhaps someone decides to direct, after seeing a movie on your recommendation. Realistically, there are people like me, who end up reflecting on the ideas presented in fine films. These reflections lead to life changes and philosophical growth, and these things change our world.

When I was in the 11th grade, my girlfriend at the time introduced me to Donnie Darko. I'd be lying if I said I truly understood it at the time, and I'd still be lying if I said that I truly understood it ten views later. The point here is that this movie opened the door for me, in terms of movies. I liked being challenged, and few movies, up until this point, had done so for me. At this stage in my life, I didn't even know of the existence of independent films. While DD was definitely not independent, it was a stepping stone. I would have never seen it, if it wasn't for her recommendation.

It's true; one day, our little speck in the universe will disappear. Until this happens, literature, film, and art shall continue to move the masses. While these things in themselves are wonderful, a catalyst is needed for the spread of new works and ideas. In my opinion, you serve as a catalyst. To be honest, your words don't matter so much as the actions that they inspire. This is because these actions perpetuate themselves and become almost viral.

My friend introduced me to your blog a few days ago. I had no idea of how much love you have for your work and life. It is truly a pleasure to read your writings. Take care.

Ebert: There always seems to be a particular movie that opens our eyes and makes us say, something is happening up there, and I want to know more about it.

With regards to the unseen tree falling, have you heard about the "teleportation" of information on an ion the other day?

Apparently, two ytterbium ions were put in separate containers connected by some kind of tunnel. Information was written on one, and then they were induced to emit photons. The photons were put through a beam splitter, which could either let the photons pass through to the other side or reflect them back the way they came. We have no way of knowing which occurred, so the photons became entangled, which entangled their parent ions.

Now, if you move one of the photons, the other moves the opposite way. If you irradiate the information on the one ion, it shows up on the other. In a very real way, man is no longer observing reality but determining it.

Reading about this experiment made me think of Kieslowski. I certainly look at The Double Life of Veronique in a new light.

Ebert: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

I see... the Mandlebrot set is like an image of the infinite archive-- the web, all writing, etc. You are talking about the archive.

Freud, Derrida and many others rightly see the archive as relating to death. We store things in the archive in an attempt to stave off death, to "preserve" in the face of certain decay or loss. But then the archive grows too large, grows larger than us, to the scale of the Sublime, and merely becomes a stand-in for the terror of death, that point at which we are truly beyond ourselves.

My favorite description of the archival sublime is in Borges's "The Library of Babel," in which the entire universe is contained within an archive:

"Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species-- the unique species-- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret."

This reminds me-- have you seen the sequence in "The Barbarian Invasions" when the son visits the professor's house? He looks at the many radical books in his father's library, now useless and mute without their owner. It is like they stare back, having triumphantly outlived their master.

Ebert: "The Library of Babel" is a must-read. The text below is more easily readable if you copy it to a text file.

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jatill/175/libraryf.htm

Roger,

I've been reading your reviews since I was a child and they have inspired a love of film in me that will last forever. I was not very familiar with your writing unrelated to film until recently, but after reading some of your recent posts I do feel that if contemporary journalist's words will last the test of time (or a while at least) they are yours.

I've been thinking a lot about Alan Bennett's play, "The History Boys," whose protagonist says in the epilogue that "the game" he wished to teach to his students was "to pass it on." There is a production opening here this Wednesday night, and I've been its music director, teaching the student cast songs by Edith Piaf and Gracie Fields, a motet by Dunstable, and the Sheffield United Football Club anthem, "The Greasy Chip Butty Song," sung to the tune of John Denver's "Annie's Song."

Your column and its comments put me in mind of a short conversation I had on a bus around ten years ago; I was taking a Greyhound from Ithaca to Toronto to see my folks over Christmas, and I was reading "Twelfth Night" in anticipation of seeing "Shakespeare in Love" over the break. I had an aisle seat; across the aisle there was a woman in her forties, beside a sleeping child, and in the four seats of the row in front, her husband and three other children. She spoke to them somewhere between firmly and sharply, but at some point she turned to me and asked what I was reading, in a very different tone. I was reading from a nice looking single volume, a gift from my mother's best friend to my mother in the 1950s, which I have had for many years. I told her what I was reading, a bit about the play, and why I'd decided it was a good time to brush up.

"Do you think I could find that at our local library," she asked.

I told her I felt sure she could.

Ebert: I don't know whether that story makes me happy or sad.

I wrote a book about 20 years ago about northern European runes and how they relate to Germanic mythology and paganism. Ridiculous. Only a few thousand copies, self-published, hand-cerloxed and distributed through a few speciality bookstores and over the internet. And yet, at least two or three times a year I hear from someone who tells me that my little book changed their life.

Changed their life!

Wow.

I hear that, and I think about the books I've read over the years that changed my life, and I am content. Even if my ridiculous little book vanishes from the earth after I am gone, I know that those people whose perspectives were altered and whose lives were given a little more meaning because of my words will go on, and tell others, and write words of their own. And so it goes. Stones in a pond.

Your words changed my life, Roger. Maybe not like Shakespeare or Steinbeck or Naomi Klein, but they did. And still do.

And BTW, you are absolutely NOT allowed to die before I meet you. See you at TIFF '09!

Ebert: James Thurber once drew a cartoon of a fencer cutting off another fencer's head. The caption was:

Touche!

HAHA! That is great! And it instantly reminded me of a cartoon of the chicken who crossed the road by the great John Swartzwelder: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubbercat/433303382/in/set-72157594527429441/

Ah, coming to terms with your own mortality may have to be done by us and perhaps our children, but I wonder if it is a problem humanity will deal with forever.

I recall a conversation in 'Waking Life' about the telescoping nature of progress. How it took billions of years to evolve life, then millions to evolve creatures and man, then only a few thousand for culure. A little over 100 years ago the industrial revolution spawned the modern civilization and the last 20 years have seen the information revolution. Dr. Eamonn F. Healy muses about mans ultimate future when our evolution reaches a 'sigularity' or 'crescendo' where fantastic leaps forward occur one on top of the other leading to an "instantaneous fulfillment of human" .

I postulate a future that is radically different from 'life' as we know it.

Ebert: Synchronicity. "Waking Life" will be my Great Movie this week.

Ken Wettington, quoting a wise man:

"Meaningless. Everything is meaningless."

It very well might be. But the pursuit of meaning is itself meaningful - and that's absurdism for you. I hesitate to pimp my own work (I send links to friends, but usually shy away from posting direct links on public boards), but I recently wrote a piece on Groundhog Day over at The House Next Door, where I approached "the meaning of life" from the standpoint of Albert Camus:

Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhogday Retrospective

My mom had her own radio show "Music On The Heather" for several years in the 1960s on CBC radio coast to coast. After she died I discovered boxes of fan letters written to her at that time among her things.

Shortly before she died she said to me "Nobody remembers me anymore."

I think now that she must have in her own way brought a great deal of pleasure into the lives of many people. That in itself is a wonderful thing.

Rarely are critics held in such high regard as you are Roger. Nor so well liked! You deserve all the recognition you have been given over the years.

I think the fact that you are a presence in our lives in the here and now is much more important than what will be remembered tomorrow.

I don't always agree with you on your reviews but I always enjoy reading them.

There is, in writing, a temporary belief that we matter. As writers we like to re-read our own words with egocentric satisfaction. "See--there I am mattering again," and we continue to revise, or write more, and watch in Godlike satisfaction as things take shape--a story, a review, a poem, a comic observation. When we get it right, the brave try desperately to get someone to read their words, to appreciate what they say, and thereby validate. I notice that you are kind to young or self-conscious writers on your blog, perhaps sensing that urge for validation.

We recently lost John Updike, whose prolific writing habits and easy access to print media make him the chronicler of an era--good and bad. When he is good, there exists the kind of emotive precision that allows us to simply participate. "This is a story that matters," we say. We sense the care he takes to get things right. He, too, was kind to young writers; his own writing about death reveals that he knew that someday his Promethean consciousness would end. It's better to be replaced by those with the urge to continue. Generosity of spirit can be found in the heart of every real or imagined mentors. Who were your mentors?

Ebert: In particular, Daniel Curley, who I wrote about here:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/01/theres_a_small_cafe.html

Rog,

Regarding your response to my earlier comment, I must know: how often do you run into directors who confront you about your reviews of their films? I remember the hilarious exchange between you and Rob Schneider, which ended peacefully with the flowers he sent you with the note attached to them that read, "From your least favorite actor"; but have any directors every complained about your review, or suggested that you may have missed their point, or maybe just wanna give you a lil' shit for giving their movie such a hard time?

Every artist, or at least aspiring artist, wishes they could write their own reviews, but with directors like Martin Scorsese, David Gordon Green, and Ingmar Bergman, you're the closest they get. I know you're pretty well acquainted with Scorsese (though I have yet to read your book); has he ever pulled you aside to talk about any of your criticisms about his films, positive or negative? Or any director for that matter?

Man oh man, I bet Michael Bay will never buy you a drink again after your reviews of "Armageddon" and "Pearl Harbor." Did you ever run into David Lynch, though? You've only recommended one of his movies! Did you ever have to excuse yourself while at a film festival when you saw him walk into the bar you were at so as to avoid an awkward encounter?

Am I way off here? Does this never happen? Oh, c'mon, it has to!

Ebert: David Lynch has always been a perfect gentleman. I have an interview with him from Cannes online. I wrote in one review that I suspected my problem with some of his films was peculiar to me.

I've only recently started to read your articles, maybe for the past month or a little longer. But your reviews I've admired and I often read up on films I have just seen to see what your stance was on it.

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

We as individuals are not long for this world. I have no illusions about that. I feel that the only way to live a life worth living is to somehow affect others around us. To make them think, to make them feel, so that maybe afterward they've taken something away or learned something and have changed in some infinitesimal way for the better.

Reviewing combines the pleasures of reading and writing. I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" again recently, from scratch and taking notes.

“..as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma.”

I reserve the last line of Hamlet's soliloquy for toasting psych meds: - “Be all my sins remember’d”

It would also make a good send off to any inter-planetary communication. Be all our sins remembered.

A picture’s worth a thousands words and too many to count a fractal – which ironically makes a picture; smile. None of which is surprising of course, unless you’ve never bothered to look where all truths invariably hide: in plain sight. Heck, you only have to ask a spider about the nature of the universe to see it how it all works…

http://www3.telus.net/thiliasspace/Marie/jpegs/web_drops.jpg

There’s your beginning without an end, the circle - reflecting a circle reflecting a circle via gravity and bending light. There are the stars and constellations and galaxies too, along with black holes in-between the shinning threads. String theory is less clever an idea than some would self-congratulate themselves on for thinking “they” thought it up first. Nope! Spider beat you to it, MIT.

The fear that all we make and share of value will some day disappear along with us, is based upon the assumption that we’re the only ones recording things for posterity; like all the stuff Shakespeare noticed. Who, it should be pointed out, found much of his knowledge of things he’d never seen nor done from books where he could find them - which are themselves the experiences of others making observations of the obvious but in such a way as to make them seem profound.

“"I am constant as the northern star...” the start of a speech which speaks to the hubris of Caesar, who compares himself to a God - right before he’s stabbed to death in Shakespeare’s play.

The source of creative inspiration is eternal and why what it inspires can’t be lost. Someone, human or other, will always be looking up at the sky and arriving at a point of comparison another has reached before him. If the collected works of mankind were to vanish one day, something else would rise to take their place. However in drawing upon the same eternal sources, simply be re-inventing works which on the surface, while not looking like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or flowing like the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, still be those works; just in another guise. The only really original thing is “you” – as there’s only one copy of that. Everything else is simply “the first guy” to sign his name to it.

I mean, grab a microscope and go into the garden, or take a walk in the woods with a magnifying glass and you’ll find masterpieces of abstract expressionism. Look at the roots of a mangrove tree and you’ll see “flying buttresses” akin to those holding up a Gothic Cathedral. And dive into the ocean where a jellyfish swims – it’s an alien space ship worthy of “The Abyss”. It’s all been done - all of it; it’s just waiting for someone to notice and draw your attention to it.

Begging the question, why bother creating anything if someone else has done it before or is bound to in the future? If all the stories have been, all the great themes covered? Ah, but here’s the saving grace! A billion people may indeed have written their names in the snow, but until YOU do it, no one else will ever “be you” doing it. No one will ever write a Roger Ebert review save for Roger Ebert, eh? Even if we all see the same films and come into his journal to compare notes. The voice of the individual is the only original thing we can contribute to the world while we’re alive, and leave behind us when we’re gone. And even if it doesn’t last forever or only as long as memory and even then, what matters is that we’re here at all – and trying – for it’s in participating in the temporal that we contribute to the future.

Shakespeare’s dead but his works live on, and should they disappear someone else is going notice what he noticed and albeit in their own unique voice, keep alive what was worth noting about it. What never changes is the continuity of that. We’re always going to telling our stories to one another. It’s a human thing. And when and if it’s not human, it still is for stemming from the same place. The experience of being alive.

I suspect Roger’s work will around for a long time yet, though! Technology has made it possible for him to reach far more people than previous generations of critics ever hoped to. And long after there’s no more Roger’s Journal, there will be people talking about how “back in the day” they used to post in it. Hell, for all we know, Roger could end up back down here going through it all again, only now as a film director on the receiving end of critics.

Hey it could happen! I got “pushed” by unseen forces into a blackberry push – don’t tell me God has no sense of humour.

Ooo, I wonder now what “that” Roger would film..? Something tells me at the very least, it would be set in Venice. :)

Geez, in a time where there is a belief that literate discussion no longer exists, I come here for the movie reviews and finish up getting a detailed debate on existentialism!

For me Carl Sagan said it best "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever." He also said that we are literally made from the stuff of stars, we are a tiny piece of the cosmos that has gained the ability to contemplate itself. Such a lovely observation.

Dang, I forgot to put in the link. It always cheers me up to be reminded that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGAU6EGkJVQ

I was musing on your post, and thinking about what you said about the internet being picked up by an extraterrestrial SETI project. So right now, we can look out, and, if nothing else we see that we are connected to the world, we can see the light coming at us from the stars, and a few galaxies, and our Galaxy. All this with just the naked eye. Add in a few high powered telescopes and radio dishes and the whole Universe comes alive with what is out there. There is just so much out there.

But…

The Universe is expanding. Not only that, but it is accelerating. It is stretching, the very fabric of space is stretching in such a way that it is causing all parts of the Universe to be detached from all other parts. Now, right now, its not expanding devastatingly, and our radio signals may one day be picked up by some other intelligence. But, as the future progresses, the Universe will start to tear itself apart and the distance galaxies will become separated not only in space, but in time. If we could look out and were still alive then, we would see the distant galaxies blip off, until, eventually, we would not see even the nearby galaxies.

As the Universe stretches more and more, even the stars themselves would not be able to be seen, and finally, every point in the Universe would be moving away from each other so fast, that there would be no thing that we would be able to call a Universe. The Universe would have torn itself apart, utterly.

Maybe …

Some of the details still need to be worked out (not by me, don’t shoot the messenger). Whether the Universe will end in this cold, violent, death, still remains to be seen. But even the best of circumstances have the Universe collapsing in on itself, reforming a whole new Universe in the process, wiping clean ALL possible record of life, stuff, people, and art. And all this in a finite time as well. This is called the Big Crunch.

Of course …

There is also a third option, not altogether that much better, but it’s the least violent, and gives the longest hope for any record of ANY civilization. It’s the balance between the above two fates of the Universe. Where the impetus to tear apart and the attraction of gravity barely just cancel. So, the Universe will just keep expanding, at a regular pace, not tearing itself apart, not wearing itself down and collapsing again. The stars live their whole lives, and blow-up and spread their seeds down to later generations of stars. Galaxies collide (not a violent event in general) and we end up with gargantuan galaxies with many cold, small, red stars that live a long, long time. In about a trillion years these ancient stars start to die, themselves. And all the Universe is populated with black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs; the end product of stars. And then these slowly cool. What we would see would be a nice long natural life for the Universe, and unlike the first example above, we would be able to SEE all of it, and that very well. And yet, this heat death (as it is called) would be very lonely, and a whimper (if you will). Just the slow decay of all star-stuff, until everything settles out to the same temperature of just above absolute zero, and then that would be it. But, nothing would then impede our ability to preserve, ad infinitum, the existence of us and all we have done. So, maybe this would be the most hopeful of fates of the Universe.

Dr. Miles Blanton

Ebert: I fall into a sort of cosmic reverie at such a description, which you do so concisely and vividly. But I do not understand how we would be able, in your third case, "to preserve, ad infinitum, the existence of us and all we have done."

And here is just a stupid question, I'm sure: Why just above absolute zero? Why not absolute zero?

"Ebert: Do you think there is an infinite number of grammatical English sentences? My guess: A very many indeed, but not infinite."

Roger, is that really your guess?

What about the sentence: "aaaa" is a string of four letters.

Or consider: "'aaaa' is a string of four letters." is a sentence I just made up.

There are an infinite number because many rules of grammar are recursive, just like the Mandelbrot set.

Interesting reflections on the afterlife, Roger.

In earlier posts you inpsired discussion on whether we have a soul and whether that soul lives on after our bodies cease to function; now in this post you inspire discussion on whether our words live on after we share them with others.

Great post.

Minor error: 18 of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto form before he died. So, he did see himself in print.

Ebert: I was imprecise. I meant "works," not "work." But your point is well taken, and I will amend.

Not sure if my previous comment got through - my computer doth protest too much these days.

Anyhoo, just in case, here is one of my favourite questions to ever appear on The Guardian's Notes and Queries section:

Would an observer, 190 light years from Earth and equipped with a powerful telescope, shortly witness the Battle of Waterloo? If so, does this mean it is still in progress?

These amazing clips illustrating "fractals" ( as Arthur Clarke said something truly not just metaphorically infinite) remind of that famous sentence by Kant:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.

It's too bad you don't know Arabic, Roger. As good as William Shakespeare is, there are better writers out there. Of course Arabic does offer a lot more fluidity than English does, but even so, there are some Arabic writers whose work surpasses the Bard's purely as a vessel for ideas and messages.

I think Orson Welles describes what you're trying to say quite well.

Question though: Don't you think there'll be another Shakespeare, ever?

Ebert: A writer as great or greater, I hope. But not another. I confess I have never even heard of an Arabic rival of WS.

It's not an important point in this context, but there is in fact an infinite number of grammatical English sentences, as I think Chomsky pointed out. For example, given a sentence such as "Mary saw Bob," you can generate new sentences "Mary saw Bob and Carol," "Mary saw Bob and Carol and Ted," "Mary saw Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," and so on, ad infinitum. (Sure, you'll run out of names, but repeating a name doesn't compromise syntactic correctness.) One way of looking at this is to create a toy grammar, such as

S --> NP VP
VP --> V NP
NP --> NOM
NOM --> NOUN
NOM --> NOM CONJ NOM

This is intended to mean that a sentence can consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, a verb phrase can consist of a verb and noun phrase (i.e., the object of the verb), a noun phrase can consist of a nominal element, and a nominal can consist of just a noun, or a conjunction of nominals. This will give you "Bob and Carol saw Mary," "John and Mary saw Ted and Alice," and so on, where there's no limit to how big an NP can get.

We're just talking about grammatical correctness, of course. Wittgenstein claimed that if you could form a sentence, it must mean something, but that's another matter.

Hi, Roger. Coming to grips with the fact that all evidence of our strivings, hopes, fears, creations, will eventualy be lost in time is, I think, a key component of being a happy person. Hvae you read the philospher Ernest Becker? In his posthumously published book "Escape From Evil," he identifies the STRIVING FOR IMMORTALITY as the source of much, if not most, human evil.

That is, our anxiety about oblivion creates an anxiety that goads us to foist our "immortality projects" upon the world. We must amass a huge surpluss as a hedge against being wiped away; we are afraid of being erased, so we align ourselves with charismatic leaders, regardless of where they are leading us; we fight and kill and try to re-make the map of the world to leave a mark; arguments about religion become matters of life and death, becuase if you are right, and I am wrong, my very immortality is at stake. Living life only for the afterlife leads to a lot of really dangerous and crazy behavior (some nice stuff, too, of course).

As regards a film critic, the nature of your business is that your work is ephermeral. Much more so now, after last year's blood bath among critics, and the vertiable gutting of the profession by layoffs from magazines and newspapers. So now the critical community is shifting: becoming younger, online, blogging in real time. Even more ephemeral.

I'd like to believe, though, that there is room for polished writing about movies; for critics who interrogate what they really feel about a movie, and use the English language to create a piece intended to be definitive FOR THEM. I think pieces like that will have a long life, decades at least. Even Pauline Kael is now read only via "For Keeps". Will anyone bring your "Movie Yearbooks" back into print? Will they be stored in libraries and read? I doubt it. That's the nature of your business.

However, your name, and the title of a movie, are all it takes for a search that will lead to your writing. And I think that the mark you have made is enormous, and the body of work you have created in your lifetime is a major contribution to the ongoing story of film. People may not be searching you and reading you in 1,000 years. But in 200? I think they will. Not bad.

But that's not why you did it (and do it), is it. Joseph Campbell said, "Many people think they need to discover a meaning for their lives. I don't think that's what we need. What we need is the EXPERIENCE of being alive."

Thanks for your work. You are a part of the reason I became a film critic, and your work does much to sustain me, as a critic and even as a person in the world.

Ebert: So we pass on happily if we can truly say we experienced.

That would make a nice epitaph:

It was fun while it lasted

I honestly believe that everything, whether good, bad, or ineffable, that we humans have created will someday crumble to dust. That doesn't particularly bother me. Here's what bothers me. I'm 42 years old. I will never have the time to read all the books, see all the films, view all the artwork, or hear all the music I want to before I die. Much less to experience all the great ones over and over and over again, to live with them until they become part of my blood, part of the air I breathe. I want to desperately, but it's impossible.

I feel as if I'm in a constant race against time. Whatever book I'm reading, I keep thinking about the innumerable great ones I'm not reading. If I'm watching Citizen Kane, that's two hours I'm spending not watching The Godfather, or Repulsion, or Le Samouri. I will never, ever catch up.

That bothers me, and it goes to show how shallow I am. I worry about the lack of time I have to stuff my brain with art, and not the ultimate loss of all that art to eternity.

Ebert: An epicure need not over indulge.

"...That which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate,
But strong in will;
To strive, to seek, to find
And not to yield."

-Lord Alfred Tennyson

Have you noticed that movies have gotten better over the years? That you’ve been giving out “too many” four star reviews? Perhaps your sickness has taught you to lighten up. Perhaps movies are getting better. Or this. Did you ever consider that you are achieving your goal of building better audiences? You’ve stated before that it’s not about building better movies, it’s about building better audiences. In marketing they call that a pull strategy and you are part of that.

Maybe in 100 or a 1000 years nobody will read your reviews but expectations about the art form of the moving picture will be higher and those high expectations will be passed along to future generations. These high expectations will pull the greatness out of artists. (Yes artists do need a kick in the pants.) Have you noticed that audiences don’t jump for the special effects like they did in the 90’s anymore? How instead of brilliant screenplays like Chinatown and Tootsie coming along once in a blue moon, we have many complex stories though out the year? Perhaps the method acting will someday be considered elementary and a next generation of Marlon Brando’s will come along and introduce us to something completely knew. You as a critic are part of that piece of the puzzle and it’s not such a small piece. Having a mainstream film like The Dark Knight containing such greatness is your legacy. You are part of that film. You pushed audiences to demand more from the creators and they got more and are better for it.

Immortality. Its what its all, at least, partially about. I don't have much to add, but Yeats certainly did.

Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Or maybe Keats...

When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Ebert: We know their dreams enough to know they dreamed and are dead.

A rereading of your piece sends many more thoughts scattering; hope I can catch a few. On the subject of sights and sounds that have a particular, sometimes very brief, shelf life, I think of the gaze: We attempt to apprehend an image, to restrain a feeling, and all we are soon left with is the truth about ourselves: What we need, what we value.

I think of Christmastime, and family photos: How we line up in various formations, wearing our Sunday best, sucking in our guts, being urged by the photographer, Grandma, to show a smile, and to hold that pose just there for, for the longest damn time, as Grandma hurries to her place, our backs beginning to ache, our minds blurry from the meal, the children mounting a protest. And then the pictures are locked away in stacks of photo albums on our grandparents' shelves and in cardboard boxes in parents' closets, only to be seen again by those fidgeting children, now curiously investigating family life. I think that the tradition of family photo-taking, too, is about a feeling, in the moment. Not much about preserving anything.

And then we have the feelings themselves. The most glorious and the crummiest of feelings all fade away--soaking into the marrow, we can hope.

Damn, that's all the thoughts I could catch. Tell me if you see the other ones.

Ebert: Will people ever learn to stop posing family photographs! What ypu do is, sit in the corner unnoticed and shoot spontaneous candids. There's your family, not the waxworks group.

In a book called The World Without Us, it's stated that the last remnants of man will be radio signals broadcast in the 50's. They will move increasingly faster in a spherical shape, exiting the top and bottom of the galaxy around 2450. Should an alien lifeform ever encounter these repeats of I Love Lucy, they will no doubt have no understanding of what they are witnessing. But they will hear the sound of our laughter. And that will be the last memory of our world.

Out here "I don't need no stinking witnasses". The tree exits and falls regardless of witnesses, who needs them, they are just an intrusion.

I don't need a witness but i'm a nice guy so i don't mind being yours.

You have the advantage over Shakespeare, you can write up to your last breath and have it posted immediately or stream it live! I'm interested to here your final thought, though not too soon i hope. Please be sure it is truly final, we don't want any relapse into existence with a "tunnel of light" story.

Ebert: My final thought may be, "I wish I could type so I could share this with JR in Texas."

Oh my god! I can't believe Mr. Ebert reads Salon.com and, in particular, Cary Tennis' advice column. I have been reading the column for a long time before I discovered your blog (but I love your blog a lot more than that column). When I saw the first paragraph you wrote, my mind immediately went to that article last week. And I was right! Do you read Glen Greenwald too? Geez, suddenly the Internet seems to have shrunk in my perception. Similar minds actually bump into each other in more than one place. I guess it is not nearly as vast as I thought.

We talk about Shakespeare, yet for this particular truth of life I tend to go with Newton. His First Law of Thermodynamics gives me a basis of faith.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change form.

What this means to me, when I realized if this Law, this theory of science, this notion of Newton, was true, it helped me live my life the way that I do. Here is how.

The notion of a soul is empty to me. It is based in little “fact” or hard evidence. What I do except, is that much of what makes me, me, and you, you and Roger, Roger are all the bio-electrical firings going off in the synapses of our brains.

When I read Roger’s blog, or watch an episode of Dirty Jobs, or listen to Mozart, there are firings in the synapses of my brain. Connections are made, thoughts are produced, and sometimes emotions are stirred. All these firings are bio-electrical, and for all their smallness is size, they are still energy.

And if that energy is the same as the energy that Newton talks about, and if it can not be created, nor destroyed, and can only change form, that in a very real sense there is no end.

If what causes me to be me, was the random combination of the genes of my mother and father, and they are the combinations of their parents, and as I type this I hear Yul Brynner singing the lines from The King and I “Etcetera ..Etcetera”, then what caused those combinations was energy. So, I am made up of the energy of all my ancestors. So my connection with the past is secure.

Everyday I live with the notion that it could all end right now. Not in the sense of fear of the unknown, or paranoia of impending death. Just a respect for the suddenness of random chance. So instead of living with fear, I choose to enjoy the moments. I wake up early so I can just lay next to my gal, and hold her, and feel close to her. In our complex and busy lives this is ten or fifteen minutes that we are present for one another. Mostly, it’s just cold in the bedroom and it’s nice to share our warmth, our energy.

When I encounter someone for the first time I normally say “Good Morning” with a happy inflection. Now, at 10:30 pm, in the coffee shop with its scent of wakefulness, that usually gets an odd look from the person on the receiving end. And I go on to explain, that in my weirdness, the proper Good Evening, sounds like something best said by a vampire in a black and white horror movie, and simply can not be said with a positive garnish. Or I simply state, that no matter what time it is, it is most certainly morning somewhere for someone, most likely, on the opposite side of the planet from me. Generally, I leave the newly encountered person with some form of smirk on their face, hopefully, we exchanged a positive flow of energy. So I feel my present is secure.

When I read a book, or watch a show, or listen to music I realize the energy and industry, the thoughts and actions, are on paper, on DVD or crammed into an iPod. That someone, in the future, will find these things and will cause firings of their own synapses, and the stored energy of the past will flow into them, and be remembered. Failing that, I will most likely have children of my own. I will pass onto them my genes, my thoughts, and most certainly my way of saying Good Morning at all times of the day. And my energy will be carried forth, which secures my future. I do look forward to spending the energy making that happen.

As I think about what comes after. After the energy stops being sent out, absorbed and channeled into thought. After I think my last thought, as the synapses’ collapse, as the energy that is me comes to an end. I hope I find that the energy that once was me, changes into the energy that fuels the wind, the energy that sprouts a flower, the sonic energy of a bird chirping at dawn. And my energy blends and morphs into the energy of the world. It’s a happy thought and one that gives me satisfaction.

Good Morning to you all,

Robert

Ebert: Very encouraging. And literally true, I suppose.

What works for me, morning and night, by the way, is "Good gravy."

"I'm particularly aware of that when I watch a silent film. Those faces, these gestures, this assembly of images, all show people who are gone."

I've felt this so much before. But more so captured in archival footage at the beginning of the century, when people would take shots of real life, people getting on to Ellis island, walking down the road, doing anything; smiling and waving at the camera, as if to say, "Hello, world!"

And also Jack Kerouac's On The Road; everybody just passes by in life, never to be seen again. I think he felt this himself, his writing in that book practically swells with the feeling.

Ebert on silent film: "Those faces, these gestures, this assembly of images, all show people who are gone."

OK, Roger, you finally made me tear up a little. My father--gone too soon, 13 years ago--and I were watching a silent movie when I was a little kid, and he commented during a crowd scene, "Most of those people are dead now." It wasn't morbid, it didn't scare me. I knew he was recognizing that the movies make things hold still, and live.

He was a quiet Sicilian, used to life as being one damn thing after another, and carried that weight quietly. But he passed along a love of movies--what a pleasure for him when he purchased a VCR; I can still remember the first two movies he taped: The Terror of Tiny Town and Seven Beauties (I kid you not). And that's why I'm boring you with this reminiscence: To join you in asserting that nothing lasts forever, but everything carries on, Constant Viewers "rounded with a sleep."

We sharpen the pencil of our lives in vain----I search vainly for something in Shakespeare to counter the sense of futility which the title of your post expresses----- I only find echoes like " a tale told by an idiot."

Goethe was a better philosopher----his final supposed words----"more light"-----our sun like nature battles with the moonlike----eros and thanatos----Gandhi and King represent the optimistic aspect-----as you have mentioned above, perhaps one of the most optimistic lines in Shakespeare is "more things,Horatio...."

If mathematics, Queen of Sciences, can have something as divinely infinite as fractals , why not us ?

There is a line in Waking Life - "They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?" I think that the reason you CAN say that about life is because in both dreams and life, we usually fail to see the absurdity of our situation.

I've loved that movie from the day I saw it. I'm eagerly waiting to read your thoughts on it Roger.

"Material wealth does not necessarily make for happiness. Nor does fame. Hope is life's greatest treasure. A life without hope is bleak and gray. If you have no hope, create some"

Daisaku Ikeda

It is inevitable that history becomes distilled with each passing year. The human mind can only absorb so much. Can you imagine in the year 50,000 A.D. having to cover that much literature in school? Even in Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World," a person points out that we are losing languages at an increasingly alarming rate. Why are we so focused on what will occur after our death? Can Shakespeare derive any pleasure now, knowing that his works have endured this long? We have this need to have a legacy as if it could sum up everything about us. I'm reminded of Sterne's "Tristam Shandy" where the main character attempts to write his auto-biography, but realizes that he is living faster than he can write. Also, the need to create a legacy forces us to compete with people like Shakespeare; we enter into a kind of race to create something before we die. It's incredibly depressing and self-destructive. What am I worth if I can't write as well as he can? I don't believe that so many people could be deemed "worthless" or that their lives mean any less. Where is the judge that decides what's meaningful anyway? We can only control what happens within the bounds of our own life, so why try to influence what we cannot control? There is no impetus to do anything other than that which we enjoy.

That's funny.

I was reading the comment about the celebrity responding to the comment and a secret, muffled chime resonated within me. I’ve made comments before, and I will again, dammit! always with the completely furtive and disavowed hope of being replied to. And then, look up there, in that post I was talking about, Roger called me by name in the reply and it took me completely off-guard. Shock abates and logic quickly re-asserts itself: I hadn’t posted a comment yet. Well, look at that. The poster’s name is also Ken, it was a different Ken (if a Ken falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around to hear him, is it me?) and I felt amused and foolish all at once.

So, what I REALLY was preparing to say as I scrolled through the comments…

I wrote a story once, long ago, about celebrity and indiscretion. A half-story, actually, never finished and whether it was because of buying and selling computers combined with procrastination and the evolution of disk formats, the story has been lost forever. The other story I started in high school on foolscap, THAT dreadful thing, I still have that. My celebrity story is my digital vast and trunkless legs of stone; there was something there and it was pretty impressive at the time, but now it’s gone. Mere fragments remain in my memory.

If we knew the end was coming tomorrow…

I’m a kind of internal consultant for my workplace. “Continuous Improvement” they call it. And the biggest and seemingly insurmountable challenge of “continuous improvement” is to get people to make their workplaces better just for the sake of being better. Without the threat of “The End is NOW,” people are generally pretty comfortable with the way things are. I suspect it’s the same for a lot of people on a personal level. I’m running a 21 km half-marathon this weekend because a friend of mine who WAS going to run it died of cancer back in October. She can’t, so I’m doing it for her. If she’s alive and healthy, then I’m alive and less healthy. A kick in the pants is required for change. The scope of the change is often commensurate with the grandness of the kick. (Here for the nitpickers I’ll acknowledge something my 11th grade English teacher pointed out: “Generalizations are dangerous. Even this one.)

I read this post and was sure that by now someone would have alluded to “Ozymandias”. So it is with superior glee that I’m the one to bring it up. It may mean nothing to YOU, fellow commentators, but it sure makes ME feel good. There are other morals to this blog story, but surely the self-actualizing value of altruistic hedonism must be one of them.

And anyway, peering into that far future where surely must exist only colossal wrecks amid an endless vista of lone and level sands … well, to quote the eminent Edna Mode, “It distracts from the now.”

I occasionally ponder what would happen if by some cosmic accident my words became the last surviving words of mankind and were discovered by some alien civilization. Yes, these are thoughts that I have. I think they were spurred by "A.I.," where the robot boy became the last remaining voice of humanity.

What I concluded is that if I were to look down upon it from the Great Beyond, assuming there is a Great Beyond, I would be honored and touched, but it wouldn't really matter if the aliens learned about humanity from me or Shakespeare. Am I as good as Shakespeare? Of course not. But we only know this because we have an intimate understanding of our language and culture. An alien civilization -- or even a distant future human civilization -- will surely have different aesthetic principles, or maybe not even have a concept of aesthetics. They may not have a concept of written or spoken communication as we understand it.

My writing, your writing, anyone else's writing will do. In the future they won't have the specific knowledge or experience to evaluate its artfulness. As long as someone's writing survives, to stand for a culture that wrote and read. It didn't matter that a robot boy was the last to speak for humanity; what mattered was that humanity was spoken for, and that's enough.

But frankly, if you put my writing, Shakespeare's writing, and the Pythagorean Theorem side by side by side before an alien culture a million years from now the theorem will speak most eloquently to them.

On the flip side, I've always loved this line from the comic strip "Willy 'n Ethel", "Some times I get the feeling that none of this is real. But it never lasts."

This post makes me think of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground" hurtling through space on that probe. I think that song would make perfect sense in the cold, dark of infinite space with no one to hear it. It would still have meaning. Although, deep in my heart I will always side with Bishop Berkley on these matters.....

You've been writing a lot recently as if you're coming to terms with the fact of your own death. I've been there too often, without really reconciling with the inevitable facts. And I'm only 23. And then, like you, I thought to the inevitable death of mankind. For that will be when your words, Shakespeare's words, every man's words are forgotten: when the human race becomes extinct. It leads me to think of life on other worlds. Whole races of intelligent aliens that lived for a while and are now gone. You're never going to hear their music, read their words, even know they existed, because they're all dead. Will any of them know that we existed? It's depressing, and it makes us feel small and alone. But what it all comes back to is that we don't want to die. We want to cheat death in some way. We want an afterlife, or reincarnation, resurrection, whatever we can get so that we will not cease to be. That is the most miserable thing imaginable: to cease to be. My feeling is that you can never really reconcile yourself fully with it. And so I ignore the question entirely. Every now and then I'll have a kick where I'm contemplating it in one form or another. But it's pointless. It doesn't solve anything, and it only makes me depressed. Rosencrantz said it well. "I wouldn't think about it, if! were you. You'd only get depressed. Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?" That play had a million great quotes about the problem of death. Tom Stoppard couldn't really reconcile it either, could he?

Oh, by the way, SETI has decided that it's really all hopeless. After something like two light-years, everything dissolves into noise. I think they talked about this in Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder, which I bet struck a chord with you as well.

Basically my advice to you is to stop thinking about death. It just doesn't pay.

Ebert: Surely SETI hasn't given up after listening to such a tiny instant of cosmological time?

One more thing to remember: you are alive now.

Ebert: I'll try to keep that in mind.

After reading all this, I firmly believe that if you've ever affected ANYONE'S life for the better, even if it's just one person, then you've left your mark on humanity, and no tangible form of stored information can outlast that.

Roger,

As a kid, I used to love to stay up late on Sunday nights to watch you and Siskel talk about movies. I've always loved movies, loved seeing sneak-peeks of movies to come, and loved listening to you guys talk movies. I thought it was so cool that two people could just hang out and chat about movies, the ideas and emotions they generate, how movies can resonate with our lives and teach us something new. How they show us the world from a different perspective. Of course, I didn't understand this at the time cause I was just a kid. But I knew what I was watching was cool and loved it.

Years later, when I was 16, I saw Pulp Fiction and I was stunned - completely blown away. That was the moment I first experienced that a movie could be a work of art. I didn't understand how it worked, how a movie could transcend mere entertainment, but I realized I had been missing something up until this moment. There was no looking back.

In the years since, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about, learning about, and chatting with friends about movies. In fact, the only friendships that have maintained over the years have been the ones centered on a love of art and cinema.

In recent years I have found myself coming back time and time again to your movie reviews. You helped me grow sophistication in film analysis that I do not think I could have shaped on my own naive and shiftless wanderings. Thank you.

Reading your article and writing this response reminded me of Kieslowski's Decalogue. I discovered these amazing films while exploring your writings. This reminds me that every moment contains beauty and meaning. And this makes me want to keep searching so that I can experience as many of these moments as I can before my times up.

Ebert: Facets has issued those indispensable films on DVD. They're like the sound track for this tread. As a group, on my list of the ten greatest.

From stardust I came, and to stardust I shall return.

An artist creates first for herself. The attention of others does not validate the art; it is born as art and will return to dust as art.

A millisecond, five billion earth years. It doesn't matter. Everything ends as stardust, and art is always.

Ebert: Synchronicity. "Waking Life" will be my Great Movie this week.

Why, oh why did this simple reply fill me with torrents of joy and elation? Easy: because the combination of your writing and thoughtful analysis will be applied to one of my favorite films! Is there a more perfect union than that? I think not.

I can not wait to read it!

All the best!
Chris Ortman

Roger, these themes would make perfect chapters in the book you've never written, the book I've been waiting for since you mentioned it in a previous post. The one where the astronaut in the space station looks down on the end of the world until his radio goes dead and he slowly fades away as he contemplates all he's seen and learned (and lost). Does the astronaut's impending mortality cancel out the art, love, hope, dreams, experiences and accomplishments that came before him? I think not. But his passing does signify the end. If our arts, our dreams and our hopes are truly based on human qualities then they will survive inside all of us. I'm reminded of The Road, by one of your favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy. In it Shakespeare, fine art, the Internet ... all of it is gone, yet man survives to bear the human condition through one more set of trials. The book ends with a new generation stepping forward to face the oncoming storm. Our words may fade away forever -- indeed, this blog post may never be read again after next week or next month -- but the human spirit, the inspiration for all great art, survives.

And to answer the question if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around does it make a sound. The answer is in the question. Everyone who is asked that question immediately hears the tree fall in their heads. Maybe we weren't there to witness the real tree fall and make real noise, but by acknowledging its fall we witness its existence. And if we can get that far at least, then we might as well have been in the woods when it fell.

Ebert: My God. You're right. I always do.

Dear ER,
If Gilgamesh and Mahabharata (written about 5000 years back) are still read and discussed somewhere by someone, why do we have to worry about Shakespeare (just 500 plus) and Roger Ebert, the movie man ? Shakespeare retired. You have not. You will not. Let time take it's own course. Let there be space. Not only in the pages of your editor, but also in our mind. For all, including you. In our respective ways.Till Noah comes again with his boat to pick up to transcend.
Cheers !

Great post. Your comments on why do we write? Why do we read? reminded me of a line that has stuck with me for years from Shadowlands;

"We read to know that we are not alone."

That is a line that also applies to films, and I have quoted it often to explain my passion for film. While the words and films will all be gone some day, unitl then, Humans will always watch and read because the more insular our society becomes the lonelier our core is, the more we will need to know that we are not alone.

Creativity is a compulsion though, I don’t think it has much self awareness as it is expressed, but the ego grabs onto it and obsesses over some of these points, which are mostly irrelevant to its actual purpose. Wondering about the meaning of creating art is like wondering about the meaning of eating, or using the toilet…

I think you would still be writing, even if we were in a post-apocalyptic ice age and you were the last man alive, dying of cold. The idea of that to me is more liberating than god reading shakespeare in his library archives... because in a way all artists are underdogs, they can only speak for one person.

Dear Roger,

Ebert: Shakespeare has contributed to the richness of countless lives. Me, not so much.
Ha! Get ready for another thousand posts arguing against this one, bucko! I’ve just spent the past half an hour “elevated” by this blog. Add to it the YouTube post of Orson Wells and a couple minutes zooming in on fractals. Then, later, I watched another clip of Carl Sagan. “Books break the shackles of time.” Indeed. "Damn, it was a good day." (Not a KRS-1 quote, but from another poet of hip hop.) Thanks again, Roger.

Joshua Varner wrote above,

[The Mandelbrot set is] a finite surface of infinite perimeter. The set inspires a possibility that every piece of information ever obtained by humans could be filed (I like this term) into a single container. Unfortunately, individual pieces would be all but lost amid its surroundings, which stretch on to infinity depending on how deep an outsider wants to delve in their search, a metaphor for the human mind as well.

Lastly, I feel funny recommending a book to you, the world’s most busy film critic, reader, and writer, but I think I owe you after Suttree. Frankly, I feel like I’m giving a homework assignment. The author, Alan Moore, has been mentioned by others occasionally in the comments to your blog. Alan Moore, as you may know, writes “comic books.” He is the Shakespeare of comic books. The movie adaptations of his works have all been abominations. One that will, thankfully, always be unfilmable is Promethea. If I had the money, I would send you the complete books I - V. I hope you’ll take my word for it. Order all five volumes at the same time. You could read it in a day or two. You can then give it away as a great gift. At first, Promethea will seem like an exceptionally well written and illustrated version of Wonder Woman. It quickly becomes much more than that. It’s really about metaphor and existence. And the “Apocalypse.” (Added bonus, you won't have to learn Arabic to read it.) You will be dazzled. Just trust me. Let me know what you think, too.

Ebert: I've ordered it.

Paul (above) told of his dad's comment about the crowds in the silent movies. It echoes a routine I watched just last night on PBS's broadcast of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize to George Carlin.

Fitting for this discussion, when Mr. Carlin was asked what he would like for his epitaph, he answered: "He was just here a minute ago."

In response to your question about absolute zero. The whole Universe, in the third 'death' I described, would cool and cool and cool, and after some very unimaginable (but finite) time, would reach complete equilibrium, and all be at the same temperature, and would continue to cool and cool and cool. BUT, absolute zero is defined as a complete absence of any kind of motion, and this is impossible since every particle does have a small, uncertain, quantum motion that can never go away entirely, for the whole bulk object. So, even after an infinite amount of time, the Universe would still retain just a smidgen of motion, so it would not be perfectly, absolute zero, just a hair's breath above it. But just technically.

Ebert: I'm fairly certain this is another stupid question: What happens to the heat?

"Your merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved... rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. Thirty-two years of torture. Thirty-two years of slowly watching myself become extinct! My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. And his...."

If you want a great Arabic poet, try Al-Mutanabbi. Alas a lot of his power - I'd say most of it - gets lost in translation, mainly because he used so many of the...errr...loopholes, say, of Arabic. I think he's a little too full of himself for some people.

Arabic writing in general is great, though - or was - because Arabs were very proud of their poetry, so there was a lot of competition. It started to die out around 400 years ago. These days the great writers are few and far in-between, and no-one reads them, not even the Arabs.

Mr. Ebert,

Your readers seem to know far too much about the internet. I suspect they may be shut-ins and unemployables.

So long as man can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare always says it best, but I love thinking these thoughts because your brain swoops here, there, everywhere, lighting on all the things you've read and seen and written that made existence better, finer, worthy of its name.

Roger, have you read any of Alain De Botton's books? He's a wonderful writer and will compel you to read everything he mentions--always the mark of a great writer in my book. Without him I would never have read Proust.

And also: information WRITTEN ON an ion???? Where the hell did they get the pen?

Ebert: Synchronicity. I just finished walking through the Shakespeare garden in Lincoln Park and reading those words on a stone.

You might still want to consider the Kindle for newspaper and magazine content, unless you're absolutely attached to the tradition of paging through a paper periodical. It's fun for this Philadelphian to sit in a Starbucks or diner and impulsively buy a copy of The Seattle Times or The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (or some other never-before-seen-by-me paper from somewhere in the nation) on the Kindle and see what the news and opinion in a particular newspaper is like on a given day. And I can't help but think it's good for the papers, too.

I am absolutely sympathetic to your attachments to paper books, but the problem with your digital vs. print "permanence" argument is that someone, somewhere (likely many someones and somewheres) will always- once it's input into a computer- have a digital file of a book, which can always be re-formated and re-posted and re-distributed, as we constantly see with Web site archives devoted to every possible obscure topic. Whereas the books you have had since you were a child may indeed be books that only you and a few others still have... until some devotee gets them digitized so the rest of us can see and enjoy them.

But, yeah, paper books have their own allure, definitely. For instance, this old book enthusiast is saddened that classic 50's paperbacks won't be experienced much longer as, well... classic 50's paperbacks. Digitizing them doesn't do justice to the lurid yet compelling cover art that so many old mysteries had, and there's something romantic about the yellowing pages and wear marks of an old, well-enjoyed book, too. I try to focus on the fact that an old, lonely, slightly mildewed book that looks fresh and new in its Kindle re-issue (and is probably being sold for only a dollar or two) will gain a vastly wider new audience.

Anyway, no more Kindle comments for a while, I promise. Write about Kubrick or something, so I can weigh in on that.

Everything I know of Death I learned while watching The Twilight Zone. The original, of course.

But seriously, my daughter is taking a high school course called The Theology of Loss. Remember when we just took Civics and American History.
She is a senior. A theater brat. Also a person of empathy. She loves theater, she loves film. And doesn't turn her nose up at older films like many of her peers.

It is so much fun to sit with her of a late evening and watch Casablanca or Touch of Evil, The General or Bad Day At Rock or Citizen Kane, to re-experience these films with her. I am seeing them again yet for the first time.
(No, Roger, I haven't introduced her to Princess Dragon Mom yet, hey I have a reputation to uphold) but we watched the Green Mile the other day and wept our eyes out. She devours Hitchcock and mentioned (you would be proud) "You know dad, it's a lot scarier waiting for something awful to happen than it is when it happens. "Ah, she gets it", says I. And can hardly wait for her to meet Fellini, to play chess with the Knight and Death, you know the list, add one of your own if you wish. I am so fortunate.

I only fill this space with these happy memories because this post has the tinge of finality to it. A hint of mortality and Endgame. Think I'll go hug my family, pop some popcorn and put on some film noir (Tonight's a double feature D.O.A. with Edmund O'Brien and Scarlet Street with Edward G Robinson.)
As for time, space and the world,
Love is all there is.

Ebert: I'm fairly certain this is another stupid question: What happens to the heat?

Well, as I tell my students, there's no such thing as a stupid question, just a stupid answer, and thats on me!

So, what happens to the heat? Heat is basically just a measure of the average speed of the particles in a thing. In hot objects the atoms are moving fast (on average) in cooler objects they are moving more slowly (on average). As they bash around and hit things, they spread their energy (their heat) around in the form of light. In the heat-death fate of the Universe, all the energy is spread around the whole Universe, and the atoms in everything slow down over time as they collide with their neighbors, giving off light. Over a looong period of time, these collisions will simply cause everything to slow down and assume a very low temperature that will gradually diminish until everything is so cold they are just moving because of that quantum effect I alluded to earlier. They just get as slow as matter can get, physically. This is just above absolute zero. On top of this, the Universe is still expanding (though slowing down), so the light that is being given off when the atoms collide is being stretched, reducing its energy, making it both fainter (overall) and lower in energy, so its like a dying ember in the fire, it will just fade away, until you can't see it anymore.

Ebert: You are a great teacher. I understood that.

Two points...

1) That is one sexy tattoo! They should put it on the cover of fractal geometry textbooks.

2) I've been reading and Youtubing a lot of Cornel West's speeches lately. Though I haven't heard him talk directly on this question he does hover around the topic of human mortality.

Often starting with Plato’s Apologia: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He goes on to examine 'life' and what does it mean to be human. It was Socrates, West said, who recognized that "one has to come to terms with forms of death in order to engage life."

I won't butcher his thoughts by paraphrasing, but the overall point is YES we will all die and be forgotten, it's only a question of time. Not just ourselves but our countries, our philosophies, our religions, our very species will one day be gone. Knowing this tends to humble the grander visions we have of ourselves but it also exults the everyday things that really fulfill us. Like reading the paper, sharing a laugh with a spouse, having a fine meal with friends, enjoying a good movie.

I'm sure you've read that Sanskrit poem...

Look well to this day
For it is life
The very best of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and truths of existence,
The joy of growth, the splendour of action,
The glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory.
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived
Makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore to this day.

A few blogs back, you might recall that I mentioned the names of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. I wondered then if anybody in the crowd would recall these two gentlemen and what they were once well-known for having done - and apparently nobody did, yourself included. Well, I should have realized by this late stage of life that fame/celebrity/notoriety/public prominence/whatever is always fleeting, and these days it's fleeting faster than ever. We can only guess at what will last - or what will even outlast the life span of its own creators. Naturally, civilians like me hope that our favorites make the cosmic cut; it's a sort of justification to know that we're right about something, especially if we're among the few who agree about it. If SETI is really sending out all those signals - and not omitting anything - what do you suppose other civilizations are making of Spike Jones and the City Slickers, or "The Terror Of Tiny Town", or Le Grand Guignol, or the novels of Harry Stephen Keeler, or (insert your own unlikely art form here)? And if the signal breaks down as it gets farther away, could they make out any of the good stuff anyway? We pick the damnedest things to worry about; maybe we'd be better off enjoying what we have in the here and now. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. (Wasn't that the character Goldie Hawn played in "Foul Play"? *lol*) /*/*/ Of course, for more fun, we can always contemplate our own mortality - just the thing to wrap up a long day at the office, or to spice up the commute home. Those of us who still have some form of religious faith, however vestigial, to take a bit of the edge off - I'm not a Bible-thumper, and my Catholicism is pretty much down to reading Andrew Greeley's novels (by the way, have you heard from the good Father lately?) - I guess I wish it were stronger, but I'm not sweating something over which I have no control. /*/*/ As I think I've shown here, I don't do Deep all that well; maybe you got some laughs out of it. If so, I'll take it.

You are a lucky man if your 'now' moment exists in the future. Most exist in the extremely recent past, or might as well, as that's when we have no choice but to acknowlege them.

Think of playing music you don't know; Now is not when you sight-read ahead and see what the author was intending. Now is when you hear the mess you've made of it.

James was right when he posited that all of experience is a booming, buzzing confusion. What we make of it afterward is the now. No one, not even the rain, has such small thoughts as to live in a maelstrom of unmitigated input--and once interpretation happens, the die is cast, and the now is past.

As one of my profs used to drill into us, the only difference between surprise and shock is how it impacts the viewer. Poor Schrodinger's cat must answer 'yes' to the alive or dead question, until the now moment of discovery comes. Shock! And for us, looking at the dead cat? Surprise! All of that is after the fact.

The hard part of the existential question is that we must be responsible for the shock or the surprise of now. It literally is up to us to decide how we are impacted, and pick up and move on--or not.

Roger, you need to hear this less than anyone. A man renowned for his communicative skills is silenced. Shock. What does he do? He decides to keep going and decides to do it cheerfully. A true testament to the human spirit, and it turns our shock into surprise and gratitude.

Ever read Finite and Infinite Games?

BTW, I hated Waking Life. Wittgenstein meets Lava Lamp.

I wonder how prudent it is to focus on 'greatness' here. In the last paragraph you wonder if your reviews are so great, and conclude that not most of them are. Same with movies--not most of them "are worth remembering."

I don't know really know how many of your reviews are 'great,' certainly a good number of them are, maybe not most. But I would venture to say that the overwhelming, vast majority of them are *good*, maybe even *very good* if you want to get technical, if just short of greatness. If you want to use the star system, I think it's fair to say that taking the average of all your reviews (or at the least the number of reviews I've ever read from you, which I'm sure at least exceeds one thousand) I'd put the average as 3-1/2 stars.

Because for most movies reviewed, whether the movie in question is bad, good, or great, you've almost always had a very unique and enlightening take on the quality of the movie, insights into the different qualitative/quantitative aspects of the movie, and whether it succeeds at the job it aims for. When you sit down to write any review, do you tell yourself that you're going to try to write a great review? Or that you are going to try to write the best review that you can? Some will end up better than others. But they are almost always successful in illustrating your take on the movie and why you think they way you do. Very rarely have I ever read a review (ignoring whether I agreed or disagreed) and still wanted to know more about why you felt/thought the way you did. So for the most part, I'd say your batting average is rather exceptional.

And I'd say that it's the same with movies. In your view, maybe not most movies are worth remembering. Nevertheless, I do in fact remember most of the movies I see, whether they were good or bad. You once famously said something along the lines of, "No good movie is depressing; all bad movies are depressing." Whatever the case may be, I still somehow remember a great majority of the films I've seen, and I don't know to what extent I can put a value on that--I can't say whether or not they were "worth" remembering; certainly the great films I've seen are. But there's still a whole plethora of merely "good" movies that I remember, and I'm happy that I do.

I suppose my whole point is, greatness is the ultimate thing to reach for, and it's a wonderful thing to behold when it is acheived. Short of that, however, I'll very happily settle with "good." To partially steal the line from David Mamet, "Of course people like good things--that's why they call it *good*!" Worse could be done.

Ebert: I often quote Jim Hoge, who hired me at the Sun-Times, as saying anyone with the price of a newspaper should have a fair change of understanding most of what it contains. I take that as a challenge to write a movie review that can be read apart from whether the reader has any interest in the movie. Some reviews will have certain assumptions (you can't stop to explain MacGuffin every time you use it), but I think we learn new terms more by usage and context than by looking them up. I have no idea how big a gigabit is, but I think I know about what the word means. It refers to a Ginormous number of bits, right?

Reply to: Ebert: What do we think about the certainty that the internet and all its words will someday not exist? How does that make me feel, writing these words?

Doesn't bother me. You're communicating with so many people reading your blog, possibly more than you've ever met face-to-face in your entire lifetime.

Should I mention the "Outguess Ebert for the Oscars" contest? I think this might be the year when you get them all right. I'm thinking about "Chicago" and the manipulation that went on behind the scenes to bring that Best Picture statue home. Also, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" got 13 noms and it's not going to win any?

VARIOUS: Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey.. is close to Brad Pitt, his former producing partner, who has a production deal at the studio. "Button" had been languishing in development at Paramount and elsewhere for many years and was never given the green light over cost concerns. Grey pushed hard to finally get the movie made... about $150 million, after the financial incentives of Louisiana... Paramount had a color gatefold ad in Variety for Benjamin Button. Cost: $250,000, or about 10 assistants’ salaries.

You can see how this works. Brad Grey wants to prove that Paramount doesn't need Steven Spielberg to win a Best Picture statue, so he picks the best script in his development office... and wonders if "Slumdog Millionaire" is going to cost him a job.

With so much on the line, I'll be surprised if "Benjamin Button" doesn't win a single category, but even with 13 chances, I don't see where.

Ebert: I could be wrong about Viola Davis, but I think not.

This seems like a good time to mention the science fiction story "Judgement Engine" by Greg Bear, about the last human beings sifting through all collected culture to choose what should be preserved. His "Hardfought" is a brilliant story with a profoundly different treatment of the same subject.

Another perspective is "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov, which some consider the greatest science fiction story ever written. Be careful not to read spoilers of this one.

Roger, your reviews have fed my love for words over the years, and the one time I met you in person (at a distance) at one of the Boulder World Affairs conferences, your generosity and warmth touched me. So you will live on in me, as my grandmother and father and a guy I met only a few times at art openings and died of AIDS twenty years ago...

I give my tenth graders a copy of your Dead Poets Society review after they watch the movie just to piss them off and make them intellectually question an emotional experience. This year they actually agreed with a lot of the points you made, despite having enjoyed the movie.

I believe in the Buddhist doctrine of interdependence, which gives me comfort in the same way Christians feel good when someone dies and they say at the funeral "They are with God now."

Also, this 56-year old ego means little to me. My daughter and my students mean more to me. Eventually, of course, this will all be gone. The increasingly temporary nature of our media, from clay tablets to Internet sites, is strangely appropriate to the imminent collapse of civilization, I think.

Ebert: I think teaching is the most valuable thing a person can do. All the time, everywhere, in countless ways.

I sit and listen to Joan Baez's Diamonds & Rust album as I read this. The album is thirty years old. The title song is about a relationship that ended ten years before the album was recorded.

In the sun's reflected beams, nearby, my beloved cat Leo sits doing absoutely nothing, watching time run out and by with no worrying about what he is not achieving or has not achieved yet. The achy metaphor of coal turning into diamonds and metal turning into rust would be lost on him, even if he understood English.

It would be lost on him unless he understood death as we do. Unless he knew, as I do, as we all who walk on two legs mostly do, that time and life and love are built on a bedrock of sadness. The sadness of our inherent impermanence. Without time, would we fall in love? Would we want to hold onto someone "forever" if there really was a forever for us?

How much of what makes us human is based entirely on our unavoidable expiration date? How much of my enjoyment of this Joan Baez record has to do with its age, with the way it brings up in my mind an era I love, but was not part of? (She's singing 'HELLO IN THERE' now, for you John Prine fans)

What would a human who didn't have a death in his future be like? How would he behave, what would he cherish? How tightly would we hold Shakespeare and the collected Motown singles to our breasts against the ravages of time, if time didn't want them? Would we cherish anything if it was forever, infinite, a true everlasting lifetime's supply?

I've got a story in mind, my magnum opus if I ever get to it: it's about a normal man who is surprised on his death bed by a party...

"Guess what?", say his friends and family.

"What?", the old man rasps, sure that he has no time for questions.

"It was all a put-on! There is no death! Get up, get out of bed! It's time to ship you off for phase two of existence! We'd say there's no time to lose, but you can forget about time now."

In Phase Two, perhaps, there is no death, and no goals are tied to finite or infinite numbers of fading or dissolving things. Perhaps in Phase Two, there is an orange squiqqle of a highway and you are on it forever, and there are an infinite number of red balls that turn blue, and it is your soul-filling and -stirring job to capture as many of these balls as you can before they turn red, and that's how many less balls you're charged with capturing the next day. (But don't worry, the balls all start out blue again with each dawn.)

Truth is, I think we invented infinity to begin with. It's just a way of describing everything, minus us. My cat gets it better than I do. If there were no people with too-advanced brain stems, there would just be cats and bears and stars and planets, living until they die, enjoying their meals without worrying how many bites are left, or how many meals or left, or whether anyone will remember them.

And can The Beatles music ever disappear? What would constitue its disappearance? Our disappearance? Are we the only judge of whether something exists?

Now Baez is singing a medley of "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Danny Boy"... that voice is infinite, as I wish to define it. It is infinitely pleasurable, infinitely moving. That's all I need of the
infinite. If I can't take it with me, so be it, because who knows where I'm going, and who's saying they don't have a great collection of LPs on the other side?

Ebert: Yancy, as an act of writing, this is pretty nearly perfect.

"Infinity is everything minus us."

A bell sounded in my mind, and I thought: Yes.

Well, here you go. I just wrote a pretty nice response that I thought encapsulated my thoughts on the subject pretty well. But as I submitted it, my computer struggled to take me to the "Your comment has been receieved" page... and then, instead, went to the dreaded "sorry, that page can't be opened" page...

So I shot back here to the original blog entry, and my words were gone from this box. Maybe they got through to you? If not, well, it's certainly a perfectly ironic disaster. = )

Ebert: Your words fell in the forest, and I heard.

You have been touching on this for a while, but I believe you have now eloquently summed up what has been in my brain since I was kid.

My mind races with this constantly. How to feel like we matter, how to actually matter, how not to think about how we little we matter - when none of it really matters. I have driven myself to the highest heights of anxiety ruminating over this, and it has ruled my life. In the times when I am fine, it's because I am able to focus on the small -- my family, my children, the little things that I enjoy, music, art, movies, sports.

I have come to the conclusion (although I guess this "conclusion" could morph) that human beings are simply wired for survival. And as a result -- the only way to survive with the knowledge that we have is to a) delude ourselves to some degree, about our worth and about what's coming ... and b) to have the ability to concentrate on the small. And this is where tribalism comes in. And it can be bad, but also good - and we call this "community" and "family"

This is why I'm drawn to movies that touch on this theme ... The best that come to mind are "Memento" and "Dark City." The power of our own brains to delude ourselves in any way necessary in order for our world to make sense to us, and to survive -- to reduce the anxiety. We all do it - even though who try to live a life free of lies and delusion.

I knew I wasn't alone in thinking this the day I discovered Douglas Adams. One of my favorite moments ever in Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide series comes in "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" ... there's a machine that's essentially a capital punishment device. What it is, is you get in, and you attach the machine to your brain - and you can instantly visualize your relative scale/importance against the universe. And that revelation melts your brain, and you die. Here's part of that passage:

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically to annoy his wife. ... She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. "Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. ... And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife so that when he turned it on she saw the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. ... To (his) horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life was going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I think that just about sums it up.

Ebert: Stephen Crane...

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

I love and admire your modesty, Roger. It only takes one or two compliments to put me on the ego train for the rest of the week.

That said, I think you should know that, despite your modesty, there are people out there who value you as much as the established greats. I've learned almost as much about life, movies, art, love, writing, etc. from reading your reviews as I have from Shakespeare, O'Neill, Joyce, Scorsese, Tarkovsky, Campbell, etc.

Ebert: Not me.

A few things -

1. If Wikipedians have their way, your words will live on until that website is wiped clean. Your Great Films essays are often linked to, and if there's a "Reception" segment to an article about film, if you've reviewed it, you're mentioned. You're the only critic that has such standing on Wikipedia. Other critics are lumped in via Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

2. Comparing your body of work to Shakespeare's is like comparing apples to oranges.

3. Nevertheless, it's pretty cool to see you refute all of those compliments. It's not everyday that you see a Pulitzer Prize winning anybody whittle down such a vast body of work to being "pleased with some of them."

4. The person who discerns exactly why writers are compelled to write deserves the next 10 Nobel Prizes.

5. Have you read A Canticle for Leibowitz? Even if humanity, and thus the human word, are never wiped out, what may disappear is our capacity to understand it.

Death is for the living... of course, or we assume, believe what we may. Yet, This before us, so immense, full of wonder is beyond my attempt to even touch it.
i throughly enjoy the experience of such a beautiful mystery.

"I thought Perelman was funny even though I learned about most of his targets through his satires."

I always found exactly the same thing with Monty Python. I started watching them in the early 70's when a local PBS station ran them. I was in high school and didn't understand about 90% of the jokes. Every 5 or 10 years since, I've watched them again and pick up a few more jokes per episode. Now I get all the jokes and when I see an Austen or Dickens film I understand better what they were getting on about.

Great art really is timeless.

1. to the guy who mentioned the neglect of emily dickinson:

i can't take a poet seriously when almost everything she's written can be sung to the tune of "the yellow rose of texas."
really, it works. if you tried that with something by ee cummings, you'd probably bite yourself.

---------------------------------------
B. to the guy who said there's a finite number of sentences:

not true. what you illustrated, however, is the finite number of combinations of parts of speech.

let eight boxes numbered 1 - 8 represent the eight parts of speech. there is a finite number of combinations or sequences in which you can arrange the boxes. however, it's what you put inside those boxes that creates the sentence and the meaning held within.

as long as we keep dreaming up new words and situations, we'll continue to build new sentences.

---------------------------------------

3. to the guy wondering if a falling tree makes a sound if there's no human to hear it:

nothing makes a sound. a tree falling, hands clapping, and oreos crunching make soundwaves. there is no sound except inside a brain after an ear translates that wave into a "sound." counter: what if you leave a tape recorder to record the sound? the microphone translates the soundwave, just like an ear, and then the speaker on the tape recorder recreates the wave, sending it to the ear, and then the brain, etcetera, etcetera.

I was just reading the interesting comments by Dr. Miles Blanton.
NOVA did an excellent show on Absolute Zero. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/

In particular, the pursuit of a new form of matter know as a Bose–Einstein condensate. It's not a solid, liquid or gas and it occurs when molecules are cooled to the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero. . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate

When a Danish physicist created this new form of matter she was able to study it's quantum effects. For example, she fired a beam of light into it and slowed it to a walking pace. She was even able to stop a beam of light temporarily.

Theoretically, (I suppose) a Bose-Einstein condensate can be used as an eye which stores light, and releases it at a later date as a sort of hologram. Think Jor-El, advising superman in his fortress of solitude.

Egyptian heiroglyphics were a lost language for over a thousand years, give or take. Kingdoms rose and fell, and generations of Egyptians lived among monuments and relics that no one could read. Then Napoleon's troops tripped over the Rosetta stone, a century later Champollion deciphered it, and it was all found again. It hardly ever happens like that.

There are some moments in history where I really wish I could see the look on someone's face. Archimedes, Darwin, Mendeleev, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Curie...

Speaking of your presence on the net, what is the status of the current rogerebert.com review upload process? Is it complete?

Somewhere I have my copies of Cinemania (which I haven't tried to load into XP, but have on my older machines, and in their original packaging on some shelf somewhere), and I could swear that there were some films that were reviewed there that have not made the transition to the website. For example, didn't you review "Stand By Me" in print? That's just one film that comes to mind as missing online. Perhaps my memory is faulty.

In any event, my question is a general one. Are all reviews going up onto the website?

Ebert: Amazingly, apparently I didn't.

Jim Emerson was the editor of Cinemania, and has ported all those reviews over here.

Once as I looked the stars on a particularly beautiful night I realized with sadness that one day, many billions of years in the future, they would no longer be there. Then I caught myself... "wait a second, once I'm gone, they're gone. Those stars are only going to be there 50 or so more years. They might die tonight." That's sad, but I don't think there's any doubt that in the recognition of beauty we experience something definite. Joseph Campbell said something along the lines of "the moment is timeless, and in that timelessness is eternity."

Additionally, at the risk of coming across as flaky I'll submit this: If time travel is possible we will all, always still be alive in the past. That counts as something, and seems to reaffirm the fact that there is significance in moment we're in.

What has been generated once can be generated through eternity in every variety, in this sort of place. A competitive being is wired for fearing loss while losing the sense of metamorphosis. Would contact with life elsewhere in the cosmos change this attitude? Is that really necessary? Letting go is not only the initiation of mental adaptation.

You know, life is a strange thing. A human being is a complex, intricate network of infinite synchronicity, and yet in our depressions, we behave as though we are just another fart in the wind. We identify ourselves with the totality of who we are and what we know, forgetting that there exists, independent of our knowledge, a vast expanse of truth, mystery and endless discovery. The arts, when done right, reveal this sense of mystery and "more than me"-ness, and the sciences explain it. But this great expanse of the unknown goes ignored by most people for most of their lives. Most are content to stay comfortable in their religion or their lifestyle or their money, or whatever other standard of living life well they have chosen. But really, they are just another fractal on the Mandelbrot set of reality. The great comedy -- we think we are more important than we really are. We choose to believe in lies that will establish our permanence in our mind, rather than dive into the unknown -- the true reality -- and possibly face the fact that we really ARE just another fart in the wind. However, we ourselves are a new Mandelbrot set. For each level of understanding, there exists the possibility for further inquiry, which will spawn even more questions and answers, etc. The ultimate unifying truth eludes us, but this fact is the basis of all great mythology, art, religion, etc. The story of the turtles upon turtles in Buddhism... The story of Brahmas on the lotus flowers in Hinduism...

I believe that the idea of God is a reflection of each person's internal drive and capacity to dive into this great unknown, even if just in a sensory way. I think that in each realm of existence -- psychological, physical, spiritual, societal, philosophical, etc. -- there is the possibility of "diving in," of finding the touch of the divine. I think that diving in is what humans were made for, and that identification with transitory things (anger, jealousy, addiction, excessiveness, materialism, etc.) are the roadblocks that keep us from traveling on down the rabbit hole to more exotic and wonderful depths of understanding. I pity anyone who doesn't have a sanctuary to go to, to experience that wonderful, flowing current of infinite mystery that defines our existence.

Reading back on my post, perhaps I was too hard on "most people." Maybe EVERYONE has their own unique way of experiencing this bottomless life-energy, even the ones that seem like they do not. But perhaps some people minimize its importance. But it is why we are alive... It is what will make us FEEL alive. When we lose touch with the infinite, the unknown, the mysterious, in favor of the concrete and total... we kill ourselves. And THAT is why we write.

Ebert: I wonder if "lower" forms of life look at the sky and wonder. I love that scene in the recent King Kong where the gorilla and the woman look at the sunset. Or is it the sunrise? Or does it matter?

By Raymond Ogilvie on February 10, 2009 12:05 PM

One more thing to remember: you are alive now.

Ebert: I'll try to keep that in mind.

We ALL need to keep that in mind, like Douglas Spaulding in Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine". A Spring day today, always brings out the "I feel alive" thoughts for me.

@ Raymond Ogilvie

Apart from the sun, the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) to the Earth is about 4.5 light years away. There is nothing that dissolves into noise after two.

SETI hasn't quite decided that it is all hopeless. In fact, in an endeavor like this, the time scales involved are of many decades if not centuries.

But SETI is an enigma in science. Even though its process is essentially rigorously scientific, it is perhaps overtly optimistic in its premise – that alien civilizations will develop similar technologies, and more importantly, will want to communicate at all. That strikes to me as mere hope. We expect them to be like us in some way, that they will want to know about us as much as we want to know about them. But curiosity need not be fundamental to an organism.

And yet we try. SETI is story telling on a grand scale.

Roger, on that day you died, what were your final words? What was your final meal? What 'loose ends' would have left the biggest hurt?

Now, everyone: imagine that today was the day you died, and answer the same questions. My final words: "'Night, hun". Final meal: a cereal bar. Loose ends: no Will and Last Testament, and a friend has my copy of Dekalog.

Ebert: Final meal: I can't eat, but I will envision a Supersteakburger, Chili Mac and a chocolate Tru-Flavor shake.

Loose ends: Will all my books find teh right homes?

Final words: I can't speak, so for Chaz, I'll play Billie Holiday singing:

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.

In that small cafe;
The park across the way;
The children's carousel;
The chestnut trees;
The wishin' well.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day;
In every thing that's light and gay.
I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you
In the morning sun
And when the night is new.
I'll be looking at the moon,
But I'll be seeing you.

Just remembered this quote from Kubrick!

"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

I think it works.

We had the last dress rehearsal this evening for Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." There is a lovely speech for the English teacher, Hector, in the last scene of the first act, which takes up some of these themes. Hector is meeting with one of his students to review the poem the student has memorized, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," a poem about the enduring memory of a boy drummer who has died in a colonial war. After discussing the poem, and how Hardy often "brings a sense of not sharing, of being out of it," Hector remarks that

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

Its sadness comes from the following stage direction—"He puts out his hand, and it seems for a moment as [the boy] Posner will take it, or even that Hector may put it on Posner's knee. But the moment passes."

I think about that woman on the Greyhound bus every now and then, and I remember how politely she spoke to me. This evening, I remember suddenly, too, a moment on your program when either you or Gene Siskel recalled a line in Herzog's "Stroszek," when the protagonist said of a trailer being towed away, "I knew that somewhere in those papers we signed it said we had to pay for it."

Ebert: That is such a fine play. I saw it on stage in London, and have a DR of the PBS version.

woody allen
'i dont want to achieve immortality through my work. i want to achieve it through not dying.'

South Park had a great episode where the "Internet" was in fact an enormous machine, and on one terrible day it failed to function when it was "unplugged". The world was put into chaos: blogs could not be written, videos could not be downloaded, sexual fetishes could not be fulfilled. And the fact remained that everyone panicked simply because they couldn't imagine a world without the Web, and helplessness was the only reaction anyone could think of. Does the Internet actually have that much control?

Maybe one day the internet will break down like that and we all will have to start writing with ink, and crossing out words, and reading books and newspapers... too scary for me.

Ebert: That is the premise for a great movie.

I love watching your video reviews on the internet, Ebert, especially the ones you did with Siskel. When you both really loved a movie, when a movie just floored you guys, you were like children gushing with enthusiasm. I love to see that. It shows how much you really do love movies. I love reading your reviews, as well. I don't know anyone who I can talk with in any thoughtful way about movies, so reading your reviews are a way to get a feeling of interaction with the movie. So there's that value, to go back and read or watch one of your old reviews, for me is to resurrect the film and render it something living again just for a few minutes. I like to read thoughtful reviews that are well argued, whether I agree with them or not, reviews that connect to other things rather than merely recommending or not recommending a move.

Words, words, words. I believe similarly as you do, and pondering death I feel like the protagonist in Le Mur. In the briefest of moments I almost understand what it will mean not to exist at all; it is horrifying. So our words are like the sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy, a structure of sticks piled out on the tide line, something bent out of rock and stone readily melted and eroded all the same by time (as seen in Rivers and Tides). One wonders, does that diminish their value, does that sap their aesthetic glamour? (I like British spellings sometimes) Or does that make them more precious? To my mind, the ephemerality of language just underscores for me how needful is profound expression.

As I see it, the act of writing in itself is worth the very effort even if not a single soul reads it. For me, it has been poetry ever since I understood what it could do. I need to physically etch every word onto the page - franticly, drawn out, neatly, illegibly. I still bask in the feel of a pencil as each of my words press on the page - it presents a form of release. In my linguistics classes I've been told that there are an infinite amount of unique sentences that can be created. Although hard to fathom and still beyond my complete grasp, it seems to make it that much more worthwhile and creates some other sense of accomplishment. I know no stronger sensation.

How much great literature is already "wasted" because it is not written in English? I'm lucky enough to be fluent in a foreign language. When I read something spectacular that cannot be translated, Roger's thoughts go through my head. What was the writer thinking? Why did he write for such a small audience?

SB - Just this past weekend, I was at a cafe overlooking the Bosphorus reading Yeats, and, eventually, that very poem.

You didn't ask but my favourite Yeats poem is The Song of Wandering Aengus.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Back when the Internet was just a college thing, I belonged to a Super Hero parody thread. I, thinking I was a great wit, wrote some mind numbingly bad satire of my favorite hobby. Since no publisher ever "discovered" me, I went on with my life and graduated.

Almost 10 years later my brother sent me an e-mail with a link. And asked, "Did you write this" And sure enough It was my collection of Super Hero parodies. And after a decade step away from the material, I realized how horrible those stories were.

Moral: Your good writing will eventually be forgotten, but your bad writing will last forever.

Hmm. As much as I love both Shakespeareand the Arabic writers mentioned in another post (they truly are as good as he is), if I had to let something stay throughout the future of the universe, whether humans were in it or not, I would pick Constitution of the United States, which is truly a document has saved many a man from, well, the Karl Roves and George Bushes of the world. It's not perfect but if a piece of writing ever saved anyone, this is it.

Since you love Shakespeare so much (I do too! Don't we all eventually?), I want to recommend the Shakespeare Animated Tales the BBC made years ago. (Watch them here.) They're wonderful half-hour adaptations of twelve of his greatest plays, with some of the best Shakespearean acting I have ever seen. The casting is spot-on! I love how they make his metaphors visual. Puck really DOES fly like an arrow from Tartan's bow, for example.

Basically this is what Shakespeare would have been like had he been an animator.

“What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?”

Yes and no, I think. I mean, we all live from day to day and in that sense, in the moment, but at the same time, we think about tomorrow as until informed otherwise, there’s going to be one. Meaning you can’t blow every dime you’ve got on the party to end all parties for thinking you won’t ever need to pay your rent again. And of course, there’s the comfort to be found in thinking you won’t be forgotten for having made an effort while alive to leave behind something of yourself actually worth remembering.

One thing is for certain, we won’t be forgetting Klaus Kinski any time soon. For I’ve just now finished watching Werner Herzog’s documentary “My Best Fiend” after getting the DVD from my library. Oh. My. God. Where to start?!

I’ve never seen ANYTHING like it! You hear stories about actors and directors feuding on sets, but these two…it’s like they were the embodiment of Yin & Yang - and two different sides of crazy; one calm, the other more outwardly volatile. Either way, they obviously fed into one another’s pathologies. And ergo why, despite all the wild fits and screaming vulgarities and shots fired into tents and being described by Werner Herzog as "an outright egomaniac” - and having plotted at one point we’re told, to blow-up Kinski’s home, they wound up making 5 films together.

As irony would have it, I recently finished reading Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and couldn’t help but reflect upon the similarity, such as I saw it, of the dynamic between Heathcliff & Cathy and Werner and Klaus while watching “My Best Fiend”. Ie: I hate him because I love him.

And I love this film! I really do. It’s wonderful – for capturing something so seldom seen “unvarnished” and homogenized for your viewing safety; a rocket and a match on the battlefield of friendship. But more than that, that there was “more to it” than that; usually you only get the fireworks not the softer moments in between.

“The scum only want to hear the dirt, all the time...” – Klaus Kinski comments as related by Herzog, regarding Kinski’s autobiography; one apparently “embellished” to include the very sort of dirt that tends to sell books.

For Kinski was also capable of empathy and such tender feeling. Eva Mattes, the actress in “Woyzeck” who plays “Marie” as it turns out, recounts the story of her last day on set; of finding it hard to let go of the project – so much so it brought her to tears and unable to control them, she had to leave. Kinski quickly caught up with her and said “he understood exactly how she felt” and with an arm around her hugging her close, walked Eva back to the hotel. Later, at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, when Eva Mattes won the award for Best Supporting Actress for her part in the film, she wondered how Kinski felt? If he was upset..? His reputation for liking to have “all eyes on him” well known. His response? He told her that when she won, all he could remember was their tender walk together that day.

And for all the less than flattering truths Herzog reveals of Kinski in his film, he chose to end it with the sight of a monarch butterfly seemingly captivated by Kinski. Who plays with it gently, transferring the fragile creature from his finger tip to his shirt collar and allowing it to flutter round him and repeatedly land; his face filled with delight and amusement. My Best Fiend, ending with a smile on the face of a mad genius who’d once shot the fingertip off a crewmember.

Books can burn. And more than a few movies shot on the old nitrate film stock have been lost. I understand one of most sought-after is possibly “London After Midnight” with Lon Chaney Sr. The last known copy destroyed in a fire in an MGM film vault in 1965. And while it’s true that you can scratch a disk, it’s also true that you can repair one ( I have) and of all the mediums yet invented hold onto what we love so dear, the “disk” and the ability to make copies of them, is probably as close as we’re going to get at present to holding onto the present and what’s come before.

I also think there are many people out there like myself, who’d otherwise have been unable to see a film like “My Best Fiend” had they needed to rely upon some art house theatre to deem it profitable enough to show again. And that for me, is the joy of technology. Not that it’s replacing the books I buy and read, but rather, that it’s bringing even more stories worth telling into my home.

It’s owing to chain of events originating with a friend named Cheryl, that I wound-up eventually seeing “My Best Fiend” – as she’s the one who told me a funny story about meeting Herzog. She’s also a member of the BookCrossing – a club where people meet to talk about books, and then set them free to wander the world…

http://www.bookcrossing.com/

Have you heard about this, Roger? If not, check it out. It might make you feel better about a world that no longer seems to care about such things. For it does.

P.S. the library also had a copy of a UK film called “Sweet Sixteen” by Ken Loach, which I see won Best Screenplay in 2002 at Cannes and received “Two Thumbs Up” from Ebert & Roeper.
I’d never heard of it. But I have it now, and plan to watch it after I get back from seeing Coraline.

Smile.

The Movies are how we are going to be remembered... Even if they don't last in the long haul, I have a feeling they will be like our ancient cave drawings. The aliens will stumble upon them by some means or another and attempt to understand why we were the way we were. Images are powerful things, much more than written words often times.

I've said this before, but I once heard someone say, either in a film or in real life: "I don't like books, they're just words; words can hurt people and be deceiving. That's why math is beautiful." I sincerely believe this to be true in many ways.

For one, what ARE words if not just the complex organization of symbols and sounds meant to represent actions or things. Once those things and actions are long since dead; what will those words mean? Images last forever, even if the medium doesn't survive. The whole technology phenom of the last 100 years seems to be the icing on the cake, but what does it all mean? When you take away the plug, what are computers and software large chunks of plastic and metal which is completely empty and utterly worthless? If we were to completely unplug our connectivity today, we would be back in the Stone Age overnight. The human race is sure working towards something in technology, it just doesn't mean anything unless it's helping to better ourselves.

A lot can be said about a life lived for others, it brings one peace and forces them to see the way things really are. Rather than become obsessed with "I", one should try and focus on caring and nurturing others... It helps a lot and makes life a lot better. Trust me on this one (though I'm far from perfect).

If I knew the world was ending I would probably opt to spend time with family and friends. Watch my favorite movies (two or three of them) a few more times before I went to bed. I'd ask out that girl I like that I never asked out (though she probably wouldn't care much at that point). What I am getting at here is that we cannot truly really know anything. For now, it's better simply to be content and peaceful. Even though sometimes it's better to do just the opposite. But I'm rambling and not making much sense. Let's stick to what we know.

I love reading Shakespeare. In fact, I read Hamlet many, many times. To me it is the singular most perfect harmony of words ever written down. There is just something about the way it moves, the way it jumps off the page and into a crevasse of our mind's eye (as Hamlet would say). Hamlet has this unreal sort of immediacy and urgency to it. Even though it was written a long time ago, its language and story still are riveting. Probably because Shakespeare himself spoke through Hamlet. No doubt a lot of Hamlet was in himself. I have a feeling that if he were alive today he wouldn't take as much credit. He would have a more humble sensibility. But certain genius simply cannot be understood or explained. Sometimes great things happen. Sometimes great things are done by human beings that give us the sense that we have the potential to grow and become greater than we are. It might even be a sign of a higher order. But I'll let you be the judge.

If there's anything I've ever learned in life it's that I haven't learned anything yet. I've only just begun (as the song says). Life is like a movie unfolding before my eyes. It has sights and sounds and wonderful moments, it is made possible by the creative gifts of many. I may or may not be able to predict the outcome of the story. There may even be many different kinds of films, but they are all fundamentally equal. And yet, every inch of that Celluloid may in fact be phony, made only for a singular purpose (not always good). I don't care. All I know is that I'm enjoying the experience of watching it. And when I'm done with it, I can rewind it and watch it all over again. I cannot think of a more fitting existence.

As for your question: "Will I be remembered?" I have no doubt that you will. So, don't you worry at all. You are going to be remembered for a long time. It's my blog entry that's not going to be remembered, and that's what is infinitesimally more depressing.

(THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH I SAY WITH THE UTMOST ADMIRATION AND RESPECT--)

-Roger, you're spending WAY too much time on this blog in my opinion. I understand that you enjoy reading them and writing them (and they're terrific); I just think that you should be spending more time with your close friends and family instead of wasting your time reading dribble from a bunch of perfect strangers (myself included). I understand that you can do anything you want, and I don't know how much of your day is spent reading and responding to these entries (150+ per blog seems like a lot!). Correct me please if I'm way off base; but it seems to me that your blogs have become increasingly melancholy in tone over the course of these last few months. And that concerns me as a fan of yours and casual responder. Please understand that I only say this out of concern for your health and personal well-being. It's not really any of my business, these are merely personal views. Nor do I know you personally or your current situation. However, I have been an ardent viewer of your show for many years and admirer of your written movie reviews (though I confess, I've never read your books; I have a feeling I'll pick one up). I find you to be one of the finest writers I've ever read and for what it's worth, I'd like to say thank you. Thank you for all your time, your thoughts and enthusiasm. Your sharing and joy and love for the movies have helped to shape my own, and I have benefited in ways you cannot imagine. And I understand that you are far more than just simply the movies. Movies are such a small part of our lives, yet I feel they're an extremely important one. People like you have helped many to understand this and for that I humbly thank you. Furthermore, I hope this is not your last blog. Take care and God Bless.

Sincerely;

Steve Michael C. (film student-CA)

Ebert: Family and friends come first, but there are still hours in the day. This blog is a conversation for me. It has gathered company I enjoy.

And I'm damned if I'll be associated with a blog whose threads consist of the usual flotsam of the web. It must be edited. And I have my two cents worth to get in. Sometimes, when I'm busy, I'll post a lot of comments without any replies. Other times, I feel like talking. Readers should not focus overmuch on my replies or lack of them.

Also, the blog keeps me sharp. There's nothing in conversation like a witty rejoinder.

"But "Doubt"...... is about the title word, doubt, in a world of certainty."....Ebert

Having myself been a beneficiary of eight years of schooling from the Irish Christian Brothers, where I gained the lifelong gifts of sound English and Maths from the great Brother McKeough, the film resonates with the past...

Perhaps the antithesis of doubt is not certainty (in a legal or scientific sense, which is always at best relative), but faith, which is an act of choice and hence absolute. In fact the very nature of existence,perhaps its very essence ,seems to be uncertainty ( Montaigne's essay "On the Law" is very illuminating on the uncertainty which rules human affairs) and your own posts also are pervaded by this feeling....Streeps final breakdown shows that certainty is not easy to come by and may exist only in the convictions one chooses( "I will vote for so and so" , a simple example)....

It is too good a film to lend itself to a simplistic classifation of the Streep character as compassionless....the two characters may represent the maternal and paternal sides of "love"....the stern and uncompromising Streep also represents beauty and care in an adamantine way

Ecclesiastes just emailed me. He'd like his story back. Just kidding.

Thank you for using Mandelbrot set images to represent a sense of the infinite. For about 20 years I've been teaching undergraduate fractal geometry courses. Suprisingly often, about once or twice each semester, mortality and the permanence of information come up in the class discussions. Most often this follows the observation that all the baroque beauty of the Mandelbrot set, the repetition on all scales of similar but slightly varying patterns, is encapsulated in a rule that can be written compeltely in a few short lines of mathematics or code. Is this reassuring or unsettling? Must all texts be stored in order for all ideas to be preserved, or can big chunks be derived from a smaller set of principles? How much of a fingerprint do our lives leave on the lives of others? Enough to capture something essential of our lives? These are the questions my students ask. I don't have answers, but do enjoy listening to them work their way through these ideas. Sometimes roughly parallel properties of the Mandelbrot set drive the direction of their explorations. For a teacher, this is a real joy.

Now I can point to your blog entry as a resource when this topic comes up again. When I've mentioned your reviews in class, all my students respond well because they think you're tremendously cool. And they are surprised that their cranky old teacher would know something other than the content of math books. Thanks again for your very thoughtful blog.

Ebert: Cranky? You? Gene Siskel told me all his teachers were gentle humanitarians, like his housemaster John Hersey.

A mathematician named Tod

said 'I find it exceedingly odd...

that the spreading oak tree

continues to be

when there's no one about on the quad.'



He received back a note that said 'Sod,

I am always about on the quad

and that's why the tree

continues to be'

Signed, 'yours faithfully', -God.

vinay nair:

SETI is story telling on a grand scale.

I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean, but I love it.

For me, SETI represents the pinnacle of hope. I think Contact is a fine film, but those first moments when they receive and verify the signal from Vega are some of the most beautiful in film. I have, on my fridge, the last few sentences from Roger Ebert's review of Contact, also excerpted below, which never fail to move me. Sometimes the words grab my attention, and I stand there frozen, imagining the possibilities. "But if one came" might very well be my favourite sentence that Roger Ebert has ever written.

"When I look up at the sky through a telescope, when I follow the landing of the research vehicle on Mars, when I read about cosmology, I brush against transcendence. The universe is so large and old and beautiful, and our life as an intelligent species is so brief, that all our knowledge is like a tiny hint surrounded by a void. Has another race been around longer and learned more? Where are they? We have been listening for only a few decades. Space and time are so vast. A signal's chances of reaching us at the right time and place are so remote they make a message in a bottle look reliable. But if one came. . ."

It's not an important point in this context, but there is in fact an infinite number of grammatical English sentences, as I think Chomsky pointed out. For example, given a sentence such as "Mary saw Bob," you can generate new sentences "Mary saw Bob and Carol," "Mary saw Bob and Carol and Ted," "Mary saw Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,"
''
"Mary saw Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and decided swinging was not for her,"

sorry, silly mood

I can't help but join Bill Hays' discussion of the Oscars, though it may be a bit of a digression from the main topic (although, talk of what's going to happen at the Oscars almost certainly becomes forgotten after only a few days).

I can see "Benjamin Button" winning perhaps two to five awards, mostly in technical categories: Visual Effects and Makeup for sure; perhaps Score or Cinematography or Art Direction as well. If it is truly a mediocre film, though, I would love to see it beat "The Color Purple" and "Gangs of New York" in having the most noms without winning (they each had 11).

I was predicting a "Slumdog" victory to all of my friends after I first saw it in December. I figured that it had that special "something" that Best Picture winners tend to have; it seemed to capture some form of the American Dream, but with an international flavor (bonus points, especially nowadays). But now I'm remembering 2005, when we all thought "Brokeback Mountain" would surely win and "Crash" pulled a ridiculous upset.

The farther and farther I am away from Gus Van Sant's "Milk," the more and more special the film seems to me. Though "The Reader" should win Best Picture, and "Slumdog" is better than "Milk," I wonder why in the world the Academy would not embrace "Milk" and its very accomplished director ahead of "Millionaire" and the director of "Trainspotting"?

Think about it: Van Sant wrote and directed a pioneering independent film of the 80s called "Drugstore Cowboy," one of the toughest and most honest films I've seen; directed River Phoenix to his great defining performance in "My Own Private Idaho," and Nicole Kidman to hers in "To Die For"; brought a sense of wonder and an undeniable aura of place to a somewhat slow and basic script called "Good Will Hunting"; won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for "Elephant," which perhaps generated most of its controversy because of the STYLE in which it was made; and now a film about a pioneer for gay rights, released into theaters in a time of liberal renaissance, during which the cause still struggles to be won, crafted with a great look, a spirited feel, accuracy, sensitivity, narrative momentum, two great performances, thousands of extras, and a final shot that gives Roger Ebert, and many others who see it, a sense of Elevation. Could the disastrous remake of "Psycho" still be holding voters back?

Reading this discussion reminds me of an Asimov story, "The Last Question."

I'm not sure how else to contribute but to post the link to it in case no one has ever read it.

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Speaking of Michael V.'s observation about the tree fall sounding in our heads, I listen to you every time I read you, speaking with the homely voice both Gene and Richard heard and disagreed with on the TV.

In reality you are currently silenced, I know. But reality is perception and vice versa. Descartes figured it out: "Cogito, ergo sum."

Oh, this just occured to me, so don't take offense. Can you hum?

Ebert: I'm more of the Thomas Wolfe school: So many books! So little time!

(Shameless nonprofit plug by me!)

By Mike Farmer on February 9, 2009 8:06 PM

Ebert: I think Elvis will be enjoyed for a very long time. And a lot of jazz. And Ella Fitzgerald.

And the Beatles, I would hope.

What about Radiohead? (And was I the only one who felt a little bad for Chris Martin of Coldplay the way Gwyneth [his wife and mother to his children] gushed over Radiohead's "brilliance?")

Ebert: I wonder if "lower" forms of life look at the sky and wonder. I love that scene in the recent King Kong where the gorilla and the woman look at the sunset. Or is it the sunrise? Or does it matter?

I never thought much about insects except as they were useful/not useful to me. Oh, I loved the flying flowers that are butterflies, and respected the mighty hunters that are praying (preying?) mantises. Bees helped my garden grow. But essentially, bugs were bugs.

That is, until one day when a dragonfly and I shared an adventure.

I was driving home down a country road when I noticed a large dragonfly clinging to my truck's radio antenna. I like dragonflies, Mother Nature's jewels. The insect was getting well and truly buffeted; I slowed to a stop to let him debark. He flew off a short distance and I breathed a sign of relief. Good. Not injured. I accelerated - and then noticed the dragonfly accelerating too. He flew as hard as he could until he was able to catch the antenna and cling to it again. I slowed, but this time he didn't get off.

So I put the pedal to the metal and he hunkered down, the wind whipping his wings. I knew just how he felt. I've ridden in plenty of ragtops...

We flew down the road, and though I slowed several times for turns, he still clung to the antenna. I pulled into my driveway and parked; he stayed on the antenna for maybe 30 seconds, and then flew off and hovered nearby. But our adventure was over. As I got out, he flew around me (did he dip his wings?) and took off for parts yonder.

We both had an adventure that day. I don't know if his was as life-changing as mine.

I watched the entirety of the Arthur C. Clarke film and now I have a million questions and comments. I think Jung is right (having never especially contemplated Jung before now)--there must be a collective unconscious--perhaps it resides in the Blank Link that Professor Hawkins alluded to. I looked upon the pattern displayed by the Mandelbrot Set and recognized it immediately. I think others have done the same. It seems familiar to us on a visceral level. I find it both beautiful and haunting. How do Mandelbrot Sets intertwine with other natural phenomena such as ice crystals on a pond surface or windowpane? Is there a meshing of the geometric with the fractal and what is the result in the natural world, the mathematical world, the scientific world? I know the result of this collaboration in art--one can see it everywhere. Pattern and space, light and shadow: visual art is very mandelbrotian. Are MS present in every matrix, no matter the medium? In manmade objects such as plastics? Metals?
And are not human relations, languages, religions, social systems, cultures and eras not mandelbrotian in essence? And are not artists (and I include writers and filmmakers as such) struggling to not only demonstrate their view on (and of) this endless repeating of pattern and flow (whether they use representational medium or not) but also to set their own MSs spinning into the infinite? And if not the infinite, then at least for some amount of time?

Thank you for such a wonderful window into a world I was ignorant of. Much to think about as I go about my daily round.

By richard voza on February 9, 2009 9:09 PM

in your article/blog/stuff to which i'm responding, you used the term "bargaining."

i assume you mean stage three
know that you are a hero to many
know that the keyboard is mightier than the sword
and brings tears equally hard

"pity this busy monster, manunkind"

Ebert: I was bargaining only with my digital destiny. At this time I appear to be cancer-free.

But it was very touching for you to leave out the next word of the cummings line.

But what about the last "line" of cummings' poem?:

there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

Ebert: The whole poem seems appropriate for this thread:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

By Ken Wettington on February 9, 2009 11:20 PM

How often have I wasted time scrolling through endless responses just to if my post was found worthy of a response...?

CTRL-F is your friend (along with the spellcheck that Roger mentioned), Ken, for a shortcut to see if you've elicited a response, although I'd only recommend it after you've read other comments; most, if not all, are worth the time and effort.

As I watched the video about the Mandelbrot set, I couldn't help but think about another interesting video that's been on the internet for a while (see below). I recall Arthur Clarke was a friend of yours, and I loved his calm curiosity regarding the nature of science, existence, and everything. I've also read a number of Stephen Hawking's books, and must say that my wonder for the universe is one of the few things that keeps me from being depressed about the reality that eventually there will come a day when I will be forgotten by the universe. If I have one piece of advice for the beings that will be around at the end of the universe, "bring a towel."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgwR9ERCBo
"Imaging the Tenth Dimension"

Michael C. Whalen -- the tree-falling bit is referring to the Cartesian (among others) question of whether reality can exist outside of perception. This includes your bug and shrub.

Ebert: But things do exist outside of my perception! I just know they do!

By Jason on February 10, 2009 2:37 PM

"Your merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved... rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. Thirty-two years of torture. Thirty-two years of slowly watching myself become extinct! My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. And his...."

By Mike Doran (aka Lowbrow Crank) on February 10, 2009 4:34 PM

A few blogs back, you might recall that I mentioned the names of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. I wondered then if anybody in the crowd would recall these two gentlemen and what they were once well-known for having done - and apparently nobody did, yourself included.

Not nobody, Mike. They were Ellery Queen; I just didn't comment on it. I was a big fan of the short-lived TV show with Timothy Hutton's father, and I used to get my aunt's hand-me-down copies of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Ebert: I have no idea how big a gigabit is, but I think I know about what the word means. It refers to a Ginormous number of bits, right?

Don't try pullin' a fast one on us, Roger! As a writer and reader, I'm confident that your intuitive, if not explicit, knowledge of etymology is adequate for you to know that the prefix giga- means billion, just as mega- is million, kilo- is thousand, etc.

Ebert: I love that scene in the recent King Kong where the gorilla and the woman look at the sunset. Or is it the sunrise? Or does it matter?

It was the sunset...and no, it doesn't matter.

Ebert: David Lynch has always been a perfect gentleman.

Agreed, Roger. I had the pleasure of meeting him at a book signing (natch!), and in addition to a few copies of his book on TM, Catching the Big Fish, he signed 4 of his film's DVDs for me.

There are indeed some reviews that are in Cinemania that have not made it to the website. One of the best reviews you ever wrote, for Woody Allen's Interiors (A Great Film patiently waiting), is on Cinemania, but not on the website.

For anyone who does not know about Cinemania, it is this computer program that allowed one to instantly look up the reviews of Pauline Kael, Leonard Maltin, and of course Roger Ebert. My edition goes through 1993. Wonderful reference.

Ebert: You're right. I've sent it to Jim for posting. Ahy more?

I would pick Constitution of the United States, which is truly a document has saved many a man from, well, the Karl Roves and George Bushes of the world. It's not perfect but if a piece of writing ever saved anyone, this is it.

I suspect the Indians - the blacks - the Philipinos - the Mexicans - the Vietnamese - the Koreans - the Iraqis - the Cubans - the Palestinians - most South American and Central American peoples - most Muslim peoples - and many peoples of far flung Pacific islands - would disagree with this.

Roger,

I have always been haunted by the final scene of Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev." The painter-monk, who has given up iconography and taken a vow of silence in an hopeless retreat from all the cruelty and indifference of the world, finds a young bell maker weeping by the side of the road, in the cold mud, following the dedication of a church. The boy confesses that his father taught him nothing about casting bells, in fact, all he ever did was get drunk and beat him. Yet somehow, the boy's faith and actions rang throughout the steppes of Russia that day.

I was incredibly moved when Rublev then broke his vow of silence and gave simple words of advice to the boy, "Don't cry. Look at the joy you brought everyone here today. Such a sweet noise. Come, we will go to the monastery together. You will cast bells. I will paint icons..."

Tarkovsky then shows us Rublev's haunting, amazing works in color for the first time on film. I confess I was moved to a religious conversion by those images and words. Rublev's works will live on past his life on this planet to some degree, though I am sure the Soviets have probably already destoyed most of them. No one will remember the casters of bells, but they in their lifetimes brought meaning and respite to the many of the souls suffering around them. It does not seem so important to Tarkovsky whose work lives on and whose work dies with them. What matters is what they did with the faint calling God gave them.

In the end, I think all that matters is we are to love...love God and the universe and life he gave us...and love others...healing and enlightening those who need it through our work and actions. I hope somehow that gives you respite. It's easier said than done. I truly understand what Bergman meant when he said in effect that Tarkovsky could easily enter rooms he could only dream of.

Excellent questions, Mike S. I will have a bash:

Last meal: a quarter of a mole enchilada from Pepe's Taco Villa on 21st Ave & Camelback; a steamed artichoke heart with mayonnaise; 4 ounces of Porter-House Steak; Grandmother Caroline's Apple Pan Dowdy, and a Dad's Root Beer float.

Regretted loose ends: the vast backlog of unfinished artwork and stories. The nonappearance in MOMA and the Guggenheim. Whatever I owe to anyone or any entity.

Last words:

Life is a cell that divides and divides,
Life is a game where you need not take sides,
Life is a start-and-stop long repetition,
Life is an orange from seed to fruition.

Life may be prelude to gray nonexistence,
Life may be seen through a dimness of distance,
Death may be IT for the dead individual,
Death MAY BE prelude to Life if residual.

Life is awareness in spacetime dynamic,
Life’s full of promises Christian, Islamic,
Buddhist, didactic, syntactic and tactile,
All MAY BE summed up by curve, line and fractal.

Life is...ah, screw it!

Ebert: I wonder if "lower" forms of life look at the sky and wonder. I love that scene in the recent King Kong where the gorilla and the woman look at the sunset. Or is it the sunrise? Or does it matter?

It's almost as if lower forms of life really have no choice but to be immersed in life's grandness and mystery. Cats, for example, spend hours just sitting in one position, lazy-eyed, perfectly content. Other animals do this too. What must be going on in their head? Certainly not words. But SOMETHING. Their brains may be smaller, but I think they can definitely soak it up.

And I'm no pet psychologist, but I think that the minds of lower life forms are just variations of the psychadellic experience, evolved to the point of being able to work with their natural surroundings to help sustain their life. I have never taken any hallucinogenic drugs, but this makes sense to me.

Miles Blanton: "In the heat-death fate of the Universe, all the energy is spread around the whole Universe, and the atoms in everything slow down over time as they collide with their neighbors, giving off light. Over a looong period of time, these collisions will simply cause everything to... just get as slow as matter can get, physically. On top of this, the Universe is still expanding (though slowing down)..."

[WARNING-- PHYSICS AHEAD]
Excuse me Mr. Blanton (Professor?), but this is not correct. If we neglect the expansion of space -- a very tricky concept -- then things will reach a thermal equilibrium at some average temperature, not cool down to the quantum limit. You're neglecting the fact that atoms also absorb light. Suppose you have a perfectly insulated box: you can put a block of ice in it, drop the box into boiling water for a year, and when you open it the ice will still be there, cold and solid. Now put some warm air in it, close it and leave it alone for a billion years. When you open it, the air will still be air, and still warm. The atoms collided many times, emitted and absorbed many photons, and nothing much changed. After all, there was no place for the energy to go. The universe is like a perfectly insulated box, in that energy can't enter it or leave it.

The universe CAN cool down if it expands. This is tricky -- doing quantum theory in expanding space is not for the faint of heart -- but roughly it's like an expanding box. The energy is being spread out over an increasing volume, but that by itself doesn't cause cooling: a hot thin gas is just as hot as a hot thick gas, its atoms are just as fast, they're just farther apart. The thing is that as a closed box expands, the stuff inside (atoms or photons or whatever) pushes on the receding walls and expends energy, cooling down in the process. This is how a piston engine works. (I know, the universe doesn't have walls, but we're trying to avoid the heavy math.) We observe that things in the universe are moving apart, and that therefore the universe seems to be expanding. The concensus these days is that this will continue, and that the average temperature will indeed creep closer and closer to zero forever. (The alternative theory, a collapse into a fiery Big Crunch, seems to be dead.)

(Interpretations by Robert Frost and Bill Watterson)

I believe your review of Steven Spielberg's 1941 is also missing.

Anyone remember how Kael absolutely adored this film but disregarded his other films of the period?

Ebert: I love that scene in the recent King Kong where the gorilla and the woman look at the sunset. Or is it the sunrise? Or does it matter?

It was the sunset...and no, it doesn't matter.

it does matter. two "people" looking at a sunrise together suggests they've just spent an intimate evening and are waking the next morning. i realize that there's nothing on the cutting room floor with kong looking for his watch and naomi watts with mussed hair, sheets tucked beneath her armpits. however, you can't deny the sexual tension between the original kong and fay wray.

Ebert: And I'm damned if I'll be associated with a blog whose threads consist of the usual flotsam of the web. It must be edited.

I can understand you not wanting the usual "flaming" trash to appear on your blog, Mr. Ebert, but I have to wonder if valid criticism of what you're writing get's trashed as well? There are discussions worth having about the posterity of art, whatever it may be. And not to say anything cross of your other readers, but I'd be hard pressed to find some that don't read with varying degrees of flattery. And those that don't nevertheless don't sound very challenging. There may be some that do but that may be like finding the proverbial needle.

That said, I'd take stock in the fact that while computers and hard drives and all this other senseless crap keeps tripping on itself updating and updating and updating (there may be another word; I don't care), if stored properly film negatives can last for quite some time.

P.S. I heard somewhere your support for the Maxivision film and I figure you've seen enough to mean it when you praised it. Have any films been made using the format? I'd like to check it out for myself.

Ebert: You'll have to take my word, but I publish all the comments I receive, except for the moronic and obscene.

Maxivision is still alive and kicking. No features yet.

Not just death, but loneliness, solitariness.
Matthew Arnold :To Marguerite:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled
With echoing straits between us thrown
Dotting the shoreless watery wilds
We mortal millions live alone

But when the moon their hollows lights
And they are swept by balms of spring
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes,from shore to shore,
across the sounds and channels pour.

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent
For surely once,they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order'd that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindl'd, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?-
A God, a God their severance rul'd
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

I think that it doesn't matter whether our words last forever or are not even understood in the moment. We have to communicate in whatever form -- speaking, writing, etc. -- because communicating is a human characteristic (think of Wilson in Cast Away), and perhaps even a characteristic of any conscious being.

And you can't be sure a communication is lost forever. While some may be flat-out destroyed, think of all the past information that's lying around for us to discover and interpret once we find the key to understanding, the Rosetta stone that illuminates quantities of information whose pattern we didn't comprehend before.

I think also that we are driven by a desire to understand as well as communicate -- receive as well as transmit -- and who knows? If some alien consciousness out there is wired the same way, our signals from Earth may someday (or even now!) be understood.

Think of how hard we work to sift evidence from the world around us for meaning, and succeed. We are constantly piecing together clues in the physical world that tell us about cultures of the past.

But these are unintentional messages, not purposeful thoughts written down. Perhaps our permanent effect on the world as individuals (for most of us) is primarily indirect. It's a lovely thing to feel kinship with someone whose words you've read, "as if a hand has come out and taken yours," as Gary from Ithaca writes about the play History Boys. But perhaps because I've read those words today, and others in this blog, I will behave differently to my friends and family because of my virtual interactions with others here, who have in some instances expanded my horizons with new insights and in others provided an eloquent reiteration of my own feelings.

Is it enough? It kind of has to be. I'm OK with it.

I first read Arnold's To Marguerite in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, then (1969) and still my favorite book. Those who have only seen the movie should remember only the casting of Irons and Streep, which is perfect, and go read Fowles' wonderful work. I remember reaching the end( ?) and saying to myself both " No, not this!" and " Well, not me." Well...

P.S. every time I re-view a David Lynch movie, I feel I should wash my mind out with Lifebuoy.

Re: Mortality

I used to try not to think about death, but I've realized that keeping it in mind makes one more likely to try to live life to its fullest. As I get older, I try not to worry as much about things I can't control, and my own mortality is right up there with taxes in that category. The things to worry about are those you're not sure are going to happen: Will I get that job? Will I get into college? Will my wife cheat on me?

But if something is certain, such as death, you can pretty much put it out of your mind. It's going to happen, so you can stop worrying and go on with your life.

I have a good friend, a writer, who seems to be consumed with building his "legacy." In fact, in just a few years everything we've been and done will be forgotten, as you mentioned, even if we were somewhat prominent in our day. Knowing that frees you to live in the moment, not worrying so much about how you can affect the future, but thinking about what you can do now to make life easier for yourself and others.

Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Mr. Ebert,

I agree entirely with your sentiments about the Kindle. Nothing can replace the smell of an old hardcover, the turning of pages as you work your way literally deeper into the book. Nothing can replace the weight of a book in one's hands.

My own collection contains many older books, bought at second hand shops and yard sales. Often, the name of a prior owner is written inside the front cover, sometimes accompanied by a date from a time long past. I usually wonder who these strangers were, and just for a moment, I bring them back to life, reconfigured beings with a story. Thus, I am reassured knowing that someday my books will be in the hands of a reader and that one day a long time from now, I will live again.

If you are not familiar with Mario Vargas Llosa's essay entitled "Why Literature? The Premature Obituary of the Book," it is a must read. Among other points, his discusses Bill Gates' statement at a press conference that he wanted to "put an end to paper and then to books."

Link: http://www.uwec.edu/pnotesbd/Llosa_article.htm

Matthew Ryan

Ebert: Gates sounds like a man who has never touched a book.

I think it was Aldous Huxley who said consciousness, as we know it, man's mode of perceiving things and interpreting them, was in fact designed in large part to LIMIT what we perceive, so that we would be able to function - I think he said that in The Doors of Perception, and speculated that those drugs worked the way they did by allowing man to perceive things as he might if his organism hadn't evolved in such a way as to limit him to perceiving only what he would need to survive.

Which really has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was neat. I think I meant to tie it into the question of what animals think and perceive. I guess the point is we really have no way of knowing, but if Huxley was on to anything, presumably different animals, who have obviously evolved differently, and have different capabilities (certain animals relying more on certain senses, for instance), would perceive and think differently. Probably radically differently, so that we might not even recognize another animal's mode of consciousness as consciousness at all, were we to somehow test drive it (and yet during the test drive still retain our own consciousness, without which we wouldn't be able to make those distinctions - never mind).

But anyway I wish more people took more time to think about, and speculate about, consciousness. It might be the most interesting thing in the world but very few people ever really think about it. Theyll think about anything else, but never about thinking.

To the first commenter: the tree-falling-in-an-empty-forest is a thought experiment meant to make you really look at the nature of sound.

If a tree fell in a forest and no one was around, it wouldn't "make a sound" because a sound is an event. We use the word "sound" to talk about sound waves slamming into eardrums, not just floating off into the distance.

Without a listener, there is no sound. In the same way, without a reader or a viewer, literature and film cannot happen.

In my twenties, feel older, smell older. Glancing out onto my generation, I'm reminded of a quote, 'The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'

Be still and be proud of your long, long shadow. 'I am,' I think, sipping my flask.

The though of all art being converted to digital formats and then lost, permanently, is alarming. There is of course a great deal of 'art" that deserves to disappear into the void. But consider: if digital data are properly preserved, they are interminable. Preservation would be a complex process (the data would likely have to be converted anew every few years in order to keep up with technology), but I think there would be far more support for this as pertains to literature than to, say, a format that is natively digital.
Video games are not well preserved. Games are reviewed in part on their newness. Many people won't play "old" games simply because they have played newer ones that make the older ones seem dated. Every so often a classc game is remade and the orgiginal is included on the game disc as an unlockable bonus, but there is no standard for preserving older titles. You can still buy classic games on ebay and Amazon and what have you, but you usually have to have the original configuration the game was made for (game console with controllers and connection cables, not to mention a TV that supports those connections) and many games are so rare its all but impossible for the most dedicated collector to find them. You cannot find many or even a few Nintendo Entertainment System games in most stores that carry newer video games. Shakespeare, by contrast, can be found in almost every store that sells books.

Dan,

It's doubtful that animals experience anything in grand or mysterious terms. There consciousness simply doesn't bend that way. To rejigger Twain -- Man is the only animal that stares at sunsets, or needs to. And keep in mind we do so with senses that are considerably less sharp than those of animals.

Old love letters. That's what I have been reading tonight. It ended just a few weeks ago, so I'm sad, and the thousands of emails (3546 to be exact) are no consolation. Your thoughts on the ephemeral nature of words were what I found next, when I resumed "life." I wondered if you had any new insights on elevation, because they have been comforting to me of late.

The words in my collection of old love letters don't really matter. They bring back fond memories of events and states of being and intimacy, but are not in themselves the treasure. Alas - if only they could be! Nevermind newsprint in the rain, which is your lot in life (and you signed up for it), think of all the tear-soaked farewell letters no one will ever see, except for the heartbroken. Now there's your tragedy, mister. Love's Labour's Lost.

Getting over it isn't that great an experience! Maybe that's all it matters - if our words are lost, the universe will just get over it. (Were you thinking of sand mandalas when you included images of fractals?)

...So you didn't have an out of body experience and see your whole life replayed in review? If it does eventually happen, will you see all those movies you've watched all over again?

Ebert: Not all of them, I hope.

Ebert, you're going crazy.

Ebert: Guy goes in to a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist says, "You're crazy!"
Guy says, "I want a second opinion!"
Psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly!"

Roger, you're missing a word at the end of the "crazy" joke that makes it funnier.

Try this version: I've added only the final word, but that's the way I've always heard it.

Ebert: Guy goes in to a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist says, "You're crazy!"
Guy says, "I want a second opinion!"
Psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly too!"

Ebert: Never add a word after the punch word. Steps on the laugh.

I don't know if anyone else has made a similar observation, but as much as I appreciate your film criticism, and as often as I consult your reviews, I think your writing here is your best work. If you're going crazy, them I'm coming along with you.

Much as been said of Shakespeare in this thread and rightly so, for having contributed so much to the written word. But another was equally known for his ability to tell a memorable tale and his name was Charles Dickens.

I’ve seen many an adaptation of his works but I dare say you’d be hard pressed to find one as beautifully crafted or as well cast as the recent fourteen-part BBC television drama serial of “Little Dorrit” by Andrew Davies. Told over the course of 7 hours – yes 7 hours - no effort was spared in the attempt to realize Dicken’s poignant satire of poverty & wealth and reversals of fortune, as set against a backdrop of cruel imprisonment and the luxury enjoyed by the few at the expense of so many. All, from the leads to the smallest of characters, are vividly drawn for having taken the time to. So too the brilliant costumes and sets - from the squalor of a debtor’s prison to the lavish homes enjoyed by a self-serving class system; which Dicken’s stabs with his pen so as to expose its hypocrisy. It’s all there in exquisite detail.

It’s set to begin airing on PBS Masterpiece Classic starting 29 March 2009 - but I “cheated” and managed to find it through means I’ll let you guess at, and watch it over the course of 3 nights. I couldn’t wait – as Roger? Some of it takes place in VENICE. Where all is rendered with a painterly eye and the light bounces off canals and shimmers upwards to ripple over surfaces and transform them into jewels. Happy sigh!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/classic/index.html

They’re actually showing a series of Dicken’s adaptations this 2009 season. Feb 15th Sunday will feature “Oliver Twist”. I mention it because I’m not sure how many pay attention to such things? I love the BBC and PBS and so I’m always keeping track of their schedule, but in case others don’t, I thought I’d pass it along. For be it a book or a film or television production, a good story is a good story, and art is art - whatever the medium. And I’m all about sharing the wealth of it.

I mean, if we’re only here for a limited time, then all the more reason to fill it up with moments of “elevation” on days when it’s raining outside.

P.S. I’ve seen Coraline now and I really liked it! It’s a brilliant interpretation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel. Your review is bang on. That’s essentially how I felt about it, too. Not as scary as you’d led me to believe it would be though – mind you, after Dexter, everything seems kinda tame. :)

And no; I don't think Bill Gates has ever read a book, either. Just his bank statement.

Roger, just wanted to pop in and say... your Great Movies review of "Waking Life" is like a belated birthday present; as a fan of movies, as a fan of your writing and as a stereotypically open-minded, inquisitive Aquarius, I couldn't have asked you to pick a better movie that I'd like to read more of your thoughts on.

The film is a great exercise for the mind. That final shot alone (and the disappearing handle on the car moment leading up to it) is enough for me to just sit there... watch... and think. Then rewatch... and think again.

Surprisingly though, my favorite moment in the whole movie isn't really one that gets me thinking. It's a scene that just never fails to make me smile. Wiley is in the theater watching the two friends have a conversation that turns into them staring into each other's eyes to see the beauty of the moment. How the animators draw one of the friend's eyes tearing up either makes me smile merrily or break out in laughter. But not that vicious laughter that cynical animated shows encourage today. No, that moment in "Waking Life" makes me laugh out of sheer joy - joy for the animation, joy that the character is tearing up exactly like he half-joked he would and joy for a movie existing where two curious characters can even so much as be allowed by the filmmaker to have this moment.

Thanks for the wonderful re-review Roger. I've seen the movie twice (with the exception of that moment above, which I've seen many times) and I think I'll be watching the film again soon...

Ebert: You're right. I've sent it to Jim for posting. Any more?

Did you ever review "A Scanner Darkly"?

There are others too... "City of God"...

And then others I know you must have reviewed but there is no review for... can't think of any of the top of my head but they would be movies off your earlier top 10's that I have been unable to find reviews for on the site...

"Life doesn't work this way. We are an observer of our passage, and so are others.......
The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time." Ebert

Twenty minutes down the film "Case of Benjamin Button", I fly for refuge to your quoted review, saving myself two further hours of futility.

The way time and destiny onfold is sacred, and the depicted reversal is a disgusting travesty, a chain-saw massacre of that most fundamental of fundamental processes

The review for "Silver Bullet" from 1985 is on Cinemania and not on the site. As for Cinemania, Microsoft published more versions after 1993, the last one coming in 1997 and updating online until 1998.

Two of the many, many reasons why people will keep reading:

Jason: Over-the-shoulder cleaver holder.

Gucci is her higher power.

The plane has landed! Your "Waking Life" review is everything I hoped for. Any time a paralysis or hopelessness descends upon me, I watch that movie.

Thanks

Two of the many, many reasons why people will keep reading:

Jason: Over-the-shoulder cleaver holder.

Gucci is her higher power.

For Emilio (and any others having made it this far):

I'll disagree forever that perception is reality. And my own variation on Descartes is "Cogito ergo Um" which I translate to mean: "I think, therefore I'm not sure...."

So, I am sitting on my commuter train, waiting for the exact time of departure, and I begin to think, were am I? I know I am sitting on a train, which is at a train station, which is in a city, in a state on the east coast of the United States, which is on the planet called Earth, that revolves around a solar body we call the Sun, which is itself a star in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. But, where is all of that? And if its all moving and grooving, constantly, and as been for a long time, then in a sense I am never in the same place, ever. Thanks to the internet, I found that the Earth is twirling around its middle at 1000 miles per hour, bopping around the center of our solar system at 67000 miles per hour. Our sun Sol makes its way around the Milky Way at 250 Km/second, and takes 220 million years to finish one trip around the dance floor. And the Milky Way spends its time dancing through the void with its Local Group partners of galaxies at the slow rate of 600 Km/second. So, never, ever, are we in the same place again.

We are all dancing on the outer edge of a big, life sustaining space craft. And while all this motion is going on. The light show at this cosmic disco, all the twinkles and flashes in all shapes and sizes are coming at us from the distant past. Every quanta of light that we see, be it from the Sun, Alpha Centauri, or from Uranus are all coming to us from a past that is determined by the speed of light and the distance it has to go. Even as I sit here, typing this, what I am seeing is that fraction of a second in the past that it takes me to see the light coming from the monitor, with whatever time delay it takes my slow mind to ponder what I am reading.

And for me, the music that drives this dance party is gravity. It’s a stellar swing dance, and me and my little bit of mass is contributing to all the motion in the ocean of stars.
The connections I have with other people, both the pull and repulsion, have its effect too. I am glad Roger spends time with us in this blog. It’s like a warm hug from a fun Uncle. And maybe for him it’s a way to connect with more people, and have them connect with each other, from all walks of life, from all parts of this big space ship. To have a lasting effect on all of us that come and read what is here.

See what happens when my iPod is broken, and I have to fill the minutes before the train starts to move towards my stop. Even though, no matter how many times I get off the train, I keep moving. Why can’t I just be listening to my Buddy Guy!

Good Gravy!

Robert

Ps. Roger, when I try to use Good Gravy, it makes me think of a particular Loonie Toons with a big bull dog, a little yipper dog and a cat. Were the big dog keeps getting the little cat to get inside the houses and making off with the steaks, but the cat always forgets the gravy. “Don’t Forget the Gravy!!”

Ebert: From Bob and Ray:

"Gosh all whillikers, Mr. Science, what's that long brown object?"

"That's known as a board, Jimmy."

"Good gravy!"

Science quantifies. Using scientific means to measure the worth of something is a strawman argument. Whether words exist forever or do not completely misses the point as to the reason for their existence. It is like contemplating the flightlessness of pigs. Disingenuous.

Without a listener, there is no sound. In the same way, without a reader or a viewer, literature and film cannot happen.

Literature, film, movies, dance, etc., is always perceived by an audience of at least one - the creator. It is enough.

I don't know if I entirely agree with Liz McInnis's lovely comment. A novel without an audience is merely a diary. A film without an audience is little more than a home movie. A dance routine without an audience might be characterized as exercise. Yes, the beauty and truth we try to express through such mediums can live entirely in the creator's mind and heart. But to perform is to have an audience. Thoughts?

Art is born as art. It is creation of something out of nothing, the tangible expression of something of emotional significance to the creator. Most artists want to share the creation, to share the idea that was significant to them, but it is no less art if they are unable to do that.

Is a fawn, dying at birth in the woods and never seen by another living creature but its mother, any less a fawn?

Of course, my idea of art and your idea of art may be quite different. There is an area of philosophy devoted to this!

Roger, after reading your post, I knew I had to re-read your Great Movie review of “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” This, I believe, is my favorite movie to this day (with “Do the Right Thing” coming in at a close second). The film for me has its setting during World War Two, but is not about war at all. It is about men, and “the madness” that encompasses life.

In the beginning of the film, we watch two difference approaches to prison life. Col. Nicholson’s rigid and unflappable attitude inspires his men and grants him a brief moral victory against Saito while Shears’ attempted escape seems suicidal and unrealistic. Later in the film though, Col. Nicholson’s adherence to code of conduct for officers bring him ever so closely towards treason while Shears’ defiance of those rules allows him to display humanity, and heroism. Two men in two different situations, both of them right and wrong, depending on the circumstances.

How can we live in this world? How can we function? Every ideology has its own seed of self-destruction; there is no one perfect way to live one’s life. There are times when you are right to look out for your own neck, and times when you need to stick together with others. Depending on the circumstances, these two men can be depicted as determined, heroic, or simply mad.

Just before the climax of the film, Nicholson comments on how the bridge that he has built will stand the test of time, will be in the future for others to see some day. He wants to know that after he is dead, his life will still stand for something. That he has built something and that he will be remembered. Sounds a little familiar, does it not?

Wow. I actually didn't feel bad when I saw that you blocked out my response to your "I want nothing to do with the Kindle 2" comments. I just told myself, "well it really wasn't what the original post was about, so I guess I don't blame him". But now I see that you "only block comments that are obscene or moronic?" Roger, Roger, you're getting grumpy in your old age... I don't expect you to agree with my (or anybody's) comments, but to block a couple of well-organized, polite paragraphs that simply threw a few ideas out there for consideration, just because you personally hate an electronic device? And to consider the comments "moronic"? (I'm assuming you didn't consider them obscene, though one wonders.) Anyway, I still like you and your writing. I'll try to look at it this way: our heroes are more interesting if they have a dark side and exhibit occasional cranky behavior.

Ebert: Joe, Joe,Joe. Your comment was posted. It's there.

I am a graduate student in history and doing my master's thesis on the relationship between Mary Pickford and Frances Marion. I was doing some research last summer at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library in Beverly Hills, and was examining Mary Pickford's hand written letters. I was quite fortunate to have access to those sources and even happier that they have survived.

There is one thing that troubles me. I am worried that future historians will not be as fortunate as I have been in my research. Historians many decades from now may want to study the relationship between people of our time such as Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, or Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The problem is that most of our written communication today is through e-mail. Some people save their e-mails, but many people delete them. Many written words exchanged between Obama and Biden or Hillary and Gore have been and will be through e-mail, and thus may not survive. This will make it more difficult for historians to understand the relationship between these persons.

I am hoping that someone will try and preserve your journal entries, and will keep them in existence for as long as possible. The thoughts and feelings you had during the last years of your life are too important to lose.

Ebert: Uh, could you change "had" to "is having?" Thanks otherwise!

Thanks to "Reader," because I knew that I was not completely insane. I am a Luddite, but I still have some memory.

There are at least a few reviews missing from the website that did appear in Cinemania.

Thank you, Ron Barth,Jr. I no longer feel all alone out here amidst the more profound members of the commenting pack. Of course, your response was a little thin on details, like how long you've been interested in EQ, and whether you've kept up with it all these years. I got into mysteries big-time in high school,and one of the breakthroughs was my first purchase of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine - the June 1965 issue, cover price 50 cents. In those days, Fred Dannay personally edited EQMM, and wrote wonderfully chatty introductory notes to the stories - sometimes brief and pointed, sometimes playfully witty, frequently spiced with historical background or personal anecdotes about the classic mystery writers - what could be better? That sent me to the book racks, where you could get Queen, Stout, Christie, Gardner, Carr, et al., at 35 to 50 cents a pop (It started inching its way up to the dollar mark as I made my way through adolescence). I still have quite a few of these paperbacks - I hate to break up sets - and those under-a-buck prices give me pause in my advancing age. Today, these same books, if they were still in print (and far too many of them aren't) would go for $6.99 or $7.99, minimum - and EQMM is now $4.99 a month, a tenfold markup in 45 years.*sigh* /*/*/ I'll just throw in here that 2009 will mark not only the 80th anniversary of the introduction of Ellery Queen, character and author, but also the 75th anniversary of the creation of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin by Rex Stout. (Remember that show, Ron? Archie was played by Jim Hutton's son. :) ) I hope there will be at least a token recognition of these landmarks - but I'm not holding my breath. At my age I need all the breath I can get.

Though I have no objections, there's no need to post this. I just wanted to apologize for my testy comments about your alleged blocking of my post, when of course you correctly pointed out that you did no such thing. Lord, my eyes are getting old; I don't know how I missed seeing the post, but there it was, plain as day. Again, I'm sorry. I'm only glad my parents raised me to be respectful of others (which mostly stuck), so my odd comments to you at least showed a little restraint and mannerliness. Still, if any comments deserved a vitriolic, sarcastic flamed response from the site host, it was those. Yet you didn't do that, and just simply pointed out my error with the patience of someone who's been through this kind of thing too many times before. You're a class act, Roger. Best of luck to you.

Ebert: I couldn't leave you thinking that!

See, I took the point of this blog literally from the first paragraph and then read the rest to discover it's really about the viability of online writing and whether or not it will "survive" like Shakespeare, or (perhaps a bit less likely) Cormac McCarthy.

But this leads me to a thought about what I originally...thought this was about. What if the words we have discovered, used, read and written did disappear? What if language itself escapes this mortal coil and completely evaporates from the universe? I couldn't fathom what I'd do without language. If you were to look at my own film reviews on Flixster, or to read even a casual e-mail to a friend, you might find my text "over-written." I take solace in words. I learn them and I attempt to incorporate new words into my vocabulary (both verbal and written) every day.

These will be of common knowledge to you, Roger (I'm sure) and perhaps to your other readers, but these are just some of the words/phrases I've chosen to incorporate more fully into my verbal and written vocabulary, or in some cases just plain learn, in the past several months:

* scintilla
* Schadenfreude
* milieu
* ostensibly
* austere
* eviscerate
* proportions
* absorbing
* rationalize
* profoundly
* proverbial (used in your first paragraph, I believe)
* wicked
* sardonic
* tinged

Thanks.

Ebert: There was a real outbreak of Schadenfreudes in one of the threads not long ago.

See, I took the point of this blog literally from the first paragraph and then read the rest to discover it's really about the viability of online writing and whether or not it will "survive" like Shakespeare, or (perhaps a bit less likely) Cormac McCarthy.

But this leads me to a thought about what I originally...thought this was about. What if the words we have discovered, used, read and written did disappear? What if language itself escapes this mortal coil and completely evaporates from the universe? I couldn't fathom what I'd do without language. If you were to look at my own film reviews on Flixster, or to read even a casual e-mail to a friend, you might find my text "over-written." I take solace in words. I learn them and I attempt to incorporate new words into my vocabulary (both verbal and written) every day.

These will be of common knowledge to you, Roger (I'm sure) and perhaps to your other readers, but these are just some of the words/phrases I've chosen to incorporate more fully into my verbal and written vocabulary, or in some cases just plain learn, in the past several months:

* scintilla
* Schadenfreude
* milieu
* ostensibly
* austere
* eviscerate
* proportions
* absorbing
* rationalize
* profoundly
* proverbial (used in your first paragraph, I believe)
* wicked
* sardonic
* tinged

What would any of us truly do without words? Thanks.

Ebert: A splendiferous potpourri of verbiage. There was a sudden outbreak of Schadenfreudes on one of the threads not long ago.

I’ve only been awake a half-hour. It’s six-thirty in the morning, and by reading your article I was reminded of a dream that I had last night. I dreamt that I saw my grandfather. He’s been dead three years and I was very close to him, but unfortunately I was living in another part of the country when he died. In the dream I know he said something, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. Although I do remember his laughter. I hugged him and started to cry because in the dream it seemed that I only I knew we would never see each other again. It was as if the dream was in the past, but I was aware of the future. I’m well aware that this sounds like something someone would make up, but it’s so true that I wonder if even writing this is cheapening it. If I had not read your article, would have I remembered the dream or would it have been forever filed away in my memory? Who knows? Either way I had to thank you for writing this.

Ebert: I've had dreams that powerful. I see them as a mighty welling-up of the subconscious to assert feelings we need to access. I have a feeling that's not very original, but it's how I feel. When I was drinking, my father appeared at the side of my bed and said, "Roger, you know I'm very, very disappointed in you."

I'm not too confident about the longevity of the internet. If 99% of humanity disappeared, the survivor(s) could still just take a book, open it, and read.

But with the internet...

-You'd need electricity.
-You'd need a working PC (or Mac).
-You'd need... *sigh* an internet connection. But there's no internet anymore!
-Even if you found a backup of the internet... Damn! It's stored in a file format that is not supported by the last remaining working computer...

Given those standards, you have published books, so you are immortal. Even if radiation kills us all, my copy of "Scorsese by Ebert" will stay behind so visiting aliens can take it back to their home planet and crack its strange code.

I thank you, Liz McInnis, for sharing your thoughts on art. I'm sure a very lively extension of that centuries-old conversation could continue here. For instance, I would ask, is art the creation of the new, or is it simply a new synthesis of what already existed? Is the artist only required to quench her own thirsts, or is her purpose to create something she feels might nourish a larger audience? In other words, to experience what E.L. Doctorow calls a "private excitement of the mind," or to translate that vision for others to also see? And does Spielberg create art, or does only Fellini?

There are a few other missing reviews online, but, since I never had Cinemania, I don't know if it had Mr. Ebert's entire back catalogue of reviews or just a large selection...

Milos Forman's Hair is missing, for example. As is one of my favourite films, Withnail and I. I finally managed to track down the latter review on Google Book Search (Roger Ebert's Four-Star Reviews 1967-2007, page 860-861), which is something.

"My thumbs have gone weird."
"We've gone on holiday by mistake."
"Are you the farmer?"

Oh, don't get me started on Withnail...

Ebert: I'm adding them. There are so many reviews stored in so many places...

By Christopher Zeidel on February 12, 2009 2:48 PM

The thoughts and feelings you had during the last years of your life are too important to lose.

Ebert: Uh, could you change "had" to "is having?" Thanks otherwise!

Roger, Roger, Roger! You'd have preferred Mr. Zeidel to have written "you is having?" :D

I suppose we humans have always been striving to make copies of ourselves--not just in the reproductive sense, but also in terms of art and communication. But whereas genetic reproduction is a matter of copying form, art copies content, the contents of our minds. All of our intangible, secret feelings no one else will ever feel, art allows us to attempt to make substance out of them and send them out into the wild, to either be absorbed by others and survive or else to perish. Ever since the dawn of art and literature, we have been hard at work yanking formless ideas and impressions from our minds and transforming them into their ink- or clay- or sound-based offspring. Our art, in a way, is the second and final generation of the mind. With the internet, we have finally created as perfect a mental copy of our entire species as we possibly can--a living, breathing, infinitely intricate soup of ideas and images and social relationships swirling around in a sort of formless Darwinian memescape, invisible and silent to the outside world. Information and associations link to each other as chaotically and elegantly as the neural networks of an actual brain, an impossibly gigantic super-brain we have created to back up our own consciousness. Our culture has become almost entirely virtual and intangible, like ideas themselves. And, in the end, the final perfection of this reproduction is its mortality--it will die with us, like a brain with no oxygen. When we are gone, our cosmic "series of tubes", our species-wide subconscious mirror, will have nothing left to reflect, and our mental children will finally die out. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Ebert: At least it was nice while it lasted.

JRG - And, in that case, which one of Edvard Munch's The Screams is art?

I am not being contradictory - it's an interesting line of thought.

By Mike Doran (aka Lowbrow Crank) on February 12, 2009 5:10 PM

Thank you, Ron Barth,Jr....Of course, your response was a little thin on details, like how long you've been interested in EQ, and whether you've kept up with it all these years.

You're welcome, Mike Doran (or do you prefer Crank...or Cranky?). Like you imply when you state that you hate to break up sets, I am something of a collector/completist, and I used to assiduously collect, catalog and box all those EQMM's for about 8-10 years or so, 'til I went off to college and the time, space and resources necessary to maintain my comic book, EQMM, and other collections were not available. As a reader, my first intro to mysteries was my aunt giving me some Agatha Christie paperbacks when I was probably 8 or 9, and I was hooked on the genre. Funnily enough, I really didn't diligently devour the magazines' content although I certainly perused it. Short form fiction has never held the same charm for me as novels, so I would always be reading a book, and just never seemed to get around to the EQMM magazine content. My loss.

Re: Tim Hutton in Nero Wolfe: It might be something I pick up on DVD, but I watch virtually no commercial television (or was it on PBS?). Besides which, I've never read Rex Stout. Call me heretical, if you wish, but my tastes are more current, darker mysteries. Think Dennis Lehane (before he shat all over the fans of his mysteries by dissing the genre now that he's got the money and name recognition to write "serious" fiction), Jeff Parker, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, etc.

Ebert: There was a sudden outbreak of Schadenfreudes on one of the threads not long ago.

That was in your "The birds of prey are circling" entry. And schadenfreude need not be capitalized or italicized; it's been adopted into English, obviating the need to [i]-tag it. And did you look up the spelling of schadenfreude before typing that response? :D

Ebert: Nah. I cut and pasted.

For Ron Barth, Jr.: I'll make the semi-educated guess that you're somewhat younger than I am, thereby explaining your preference for the modern crime novel over the classic detective story. In the immortal words of Eddy Howard, "to each his own." That said, you really ought to give Rex Stout a try; the Nero Wolfe stories were a kind of bridge between the classic 'tec and the tough-guy tales of more recent times. Plus, many of them are laugh-out-loud funny. A number of the books are in print (in conection with the series on A&E) but by all means get the DVD megaset. The series producers, Tim Hutton among them, made a real effort to turn Stout's first-person prose into visual form - successfully, in the view of many long-standing Wolfe fans like me. Dark and edgy it's not, but if you liked Jim Hutton as EQ, you should feel the same toward Tim Hutton as Archie Goodwin. (Pitch ends here.)

Ron Barth Jr.

I was trying to put myself in the mind of a historian in the far future, long after Roger and the rest of us have passed on. This is why I said "had" rather than talk as if I'm in the present.

Beautifully written as always, Roger.

I know we all die. Can't be helped. Whether or not we go on to a glorious heavenly reward is open to question, as I personally don't know anybody who died, came back, and wrote a book about the experience that tells the tale with a degree of objectivity.

I do know this, though. We, as a race, must go to the stars before it's too late. Because, as Joe Straczynski said, sooner or later our sun will go out, or expand and fry us, or just explode. And when it happens,it won't just be the end of us.

It'll be the end of Rembrandt van Rijn. And Marilyn Monroe. The Beatles. The Who. Ludwig van Beethoven. Socrates. Leonidas of Sparta. Stephen Hawking. John Carpenter. Robert Heinlein. Sun Tzu. And Roger Ebert.

Everything. All we have accomplished. All our works, all our culture, art and science will be gone.

Unless we go to the stars.

I don't expect to see it. I'll be dead and dust, for a long time, before our colony on Alpha Centauri 3 is established. But I'd like to think it'll happen in time. I'd hate to think that all our centuries of culture, both good and bad, will go up in a puff of smoke because we didn't leave the nest soon enough.

Miles

And thank you very kindly as well!

Art is always new, even when it is a variation on a theme.

Why should an artist seek to nourish others? She is creating something out of her own emotions, something that speaks to her, and of her. If she does too much translating, that which makes it art may be lost. Art must be honest.

Of course Spielberg has created art! I'm not one of those folks who thinks art must be Important. A child's crayon drawing is art, if it is done with meaning to the child.

I'm completely with E. L. Doctorow.

What is your vision of art? Do you think Spielberg has created art? What about, say, the Coen brothers?

Ebert: Yes and yes, and a lot of others too.

The written word is incredibly powerful and is its own sort of immortality. I have a "treasure box" where I keep important things like birthday cards from relatives, adorable poems from former students, thank you notes from friends, papers with good (and challenging) comments from professors I loved. Some of these people are dead now, but their impact on me lives on as long as I do, and the person I became because of their influence touches other lives that will go on after mine ends. The items in my treasure box are a tangible reminder of that truth for me. Your words impact the lives of your readers and so you have an effect that will ripple through humankind for a long time to come, in my opinion, Mr. Ebert.

I think Avalon is also missing, but I could be wrong.

Ebert: I've asked Jim to add "Avalon."

What about oral tradition? It survives the death of man and the collapse of civilizations. The written word exists in only a fraction of our history--and is accessible to a limited segment of society--the literate.

My one regret is that I wasn't listening to Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' while reading this piece.

Mr. Ebert, I can't help but wonder; at mid-afternoon today, did you go outside? Did you, perchance... look up?

Don't do that. It's dangerous. We're not supposed to think about these sort of things. But since you brought it up (and since everyone else quoted poems), I feel like mentioning this verse:

"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not die in vain,
If I can help one soul that's aching
Or soothe one hurtful pain
Or help one wounded robin
Into his nest again,
If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not Die in vain"

...or something like that. I am reminded of that verse whenever the subject of mortality is brought up. Don't know why. I'm not a philosopher. But, simultaneously, I am not worried about "leaving my mark", or being remembered. I was born. I was loved, I was hated, I was feared (maybe...), I was scorned. Someday I will die. That's enough for me.

Incidentally, will people still be reading your reviews millions of years from now? Nah. But your ideas will still be around, and there are bound to be a lot of people that think just like you.

Ebert: Not that they're precisely my ideas...

I recall seeing the Arthur C. Clarke documentary on fractals as a teenager and being awed by it, though I am not sure I quite comprehended it. At the time I lost interest in maths in favour of artists like Van Gogh, but I do remember inventing something called a "Dodecathedral". It would be a multi-dimensional space-craft not unlike Notre Dame with a mirroring architecture instead of a floor. One would go there to pray and light candles (if one could light candles) and hover in weightlessness.

Questions and thoughts like this used to consume me, and keep me up at night.

I'm a young man, only 22 years old, and I'm not going to claim to have any insight or wisdom or experience that you don't possess. I just want to share how I spun those thoughts into a source of contentment and happiness for myself.

I read a lot of comments to this entry that ask the questions "Will I have left an impact", "Have I contributed to the world?", "Has my life meant anything to the world?"

For me at least, young and naieve though I may be, those thoughts are frustrating, because life is short, and we are but mortals, of limited influence.

This all stopped bothering me when I stopped measuring my contentedness by what I meant to the world, and instead sought to appreciate and understand what the world means to me.

When I get married, it won't be to have someone witness my life. I'm content to be the witnesser rather than the witnessed.

Life, love, value- All these things are relative. As long as they are, I'm going to stack the deck of my interpretation to deal me as many winning hands as possible.

It's been a pretty good system for me so far.

It's saddening to me to hear you write about being at the end of your life. For what it's worth, your writing has made an impact on me, and when you go, you'll be missed.

Until then, keep up the badass work. You've become snarkier in your latter days and it's amusing to no end to read. I always love it when people cease to one degree or another to give a damn- especially when they didn't particularly give one to begin with. I find the extra helping of honesty refreshing.

Ebert: To make a snarkless observation: You've got your head screwed on straight.

*sigh* dear god. Being an atheist and admittedly a bit of a nihilist, I've gone around in circles about this to pure manic exhaustion. I just can't wrap my mind around that idea of eternal nonexistence.

It's funny I have a friend who's also an atheist, who is completely accepting of all this. Doesn't scare him or even bother him at all. Maybe Cipher in The Matrix is right in saying "ignorance is bliss".
Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle for me. I wish I could go back to being that way.

When I think about this stuff and think back on my life; all the things I've lost over the years, old dreams, aspirations withered away, regrets. I can't help but think about the bones of those in the catacombs of Paris. Or anonymous serfs in the middle ages. Or maybe even average people who lived in the time when the great pyramids in Egypt were built. I always think about how like them I am. They must have had dreams, aspirations, things they wanted to do, to achieve that were so important to them. Now no one even knows what their names were. What a lovely paradox to discover about my own life. That it means so much to me. It means everything. And yet at the same time it means nothing.

So what's the answer (Uh oh, here I go back into those circles again)? Making an impact, being remembered? The people you are remembered by die too. Their memories are lost too. Art that I produce being enjoyed by someone a million years from now? What good does that do me if I'm not conscious? If I'm not around to experience it, or hell, experience anything for that matter?

This kind of reminds me of Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters and more specifically the existential crisis his character experiences. He finally concludes that he shouldn't bother and end up missing his life in an effort to get answers he knows he'll never get anyway. That's finally the conclusion I've come to. Mortality, eternity, etc. is a problem that just simply has no solution. No answer is possible. The brick wall of all brick walls.
Stop wasting what time you have left.
So I try not to worry about the future that much anymore (I try anyway. Not always successful I admit.). The supposed terrorists who're going to come bomb me out of existence. The SARS, Ebola, avian flu or other disease of the week that the evening news tries to scare me with. I Don't worry about how happy I'm going to be when I have that perfect job, perfect woman, those right clothes, right car, right body, blah, blah, blah (nor do I worry about what will be if I don't get that stuff). I don't worry about how much greener the grass is on that other side (that doesn't even exist anyway). Like Sinead O'Connor's "I do not want what I haven't got" maybe?

Also reminds me of an epiphany had by the main character Angel from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer T.V. series spin-off Angel. As he said:
"In the greater scheme, the big picture, nothing we do matters.
There's no grand plan, no big win. If there's no great, glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters. Then all that matters is what we do. Because that's all there is. What we do; now, today."

My favorite though is a quote from novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand:
"No, death is insignificant and unimportant. Eternity is important, and eternity is now."

Dear Roger, I've been reading your blog for some time now, but this is the first post that's intrigued me enough to post my thoughts on the subject. I'm not the first to see a parallel between your words and Asimov's probably best known story, "The Last Question". He addresses the irreversible nature of entropy; you address the ephemeral nature of human culture (and indeed humanity) on a cosmic scale; both of you deal with spans of time that the mind has a hard time grasping.

However, i think what you're actually asking is that most fundamental of questions "what is the meaning of life". Some find it in a church, some in themselves, some in their fellow man. And then there's many who spend their entire lives avoiding it. Those people, in my opinion, sleep profoundly, both during the night and throughout their lives.

So what's the answer to that question? Yours seems to be "to leave something worthwhile behind, to contribute, to add something positive to the universe". To you, it's writing great movie reviews, helping people discover great, sometimes life-changing cinema. To each of us, it is different, and to each of us it is the same: leave behind a better world than the once you were born into.

One thing i'd like to mention though : Ray Kurzweil and his writings. He postulates that at the current rate of technological advancement, by 2050 we'll have an AI smarter than all human brains combined; we will have solved all human needs by means of advanced nano-robots (a post-scarcity economy), and we will live much longer, possibly forever, due to advanced genetic manipulation and the same nanotechnology. After 2050, he can only predict that "the universe wakes up" - intelligence spreads out from earth into the rest of the universe. I'm not the one to believe such claims easily, but the man is about as far from being a crank as one could get. If his theories are correct, essentially what we will have saved and archived by that point would be timeless. And we would have the possibility to instantly access and remember every bit of it. Your entire life's work would be available to anyone, instantly. For how long, no one can know, but ultimately, your work will have served its purpose many times over, which is more than most people alive right now could hope for.

Ebert: It's his optimism about the spread of intelligence through the universe that I doubt. I think Man is almost by definition too far away from everywhere for physical communication to be possible. It would require something like a hyperspace shortcut, and boy, would that be flying blind.

By Christopher Zeidel on February 13, 2009 4:49 PM

I was trying to put myself in the mind of a historian in the far future, long after Roger and the rest of us have passed on. This is why I said "had" rather than talk as if I'm in the present.

That's probably why I was addressing what I wrote to Roger, in response to his reply to you. Was not the "Roger, Roger, Roger" an adequate indicator thereof? Jes' throwin' out jokes here...

Ebert: I like that about the "far" future.

I'm not at peace with my mortality, but I'm getting there. Our specialized brains make us think our brains are special, but it's just a feedback loop. My little dog doesn't worry about life, he doesn't know he's going to die. What does he spend his time doing? Trying to get a tasty snack, finding the best spot in the sun and the best position for napping, playing with toys that squeak because he likes toys that squeak. Enjoying the smells on a walk, because he has a good nose and it tells him where things of interest are. Alerting me to the phone because his hearing is acute. Chewing on beef chewies because chewing makes him feel calm. I watch him and emulate him - enjoy the world right now. The future is going to happen, whether we anticipate it or not. We can plan, and laugh at our plans, but worry is a wasted exercise.

When we write and create art, we are just talking to each other. Just connecting, just saying "This is me, and who are you?" The specific words might not last, but the sparks will. The first human who turned a piece of flint into a knife surely talked about how he did it. His words are lost in eternity. But the art and the idea of manufactured weaponry live on through the ages. The first hominids who worked out the idea of banding together into societies are long gone, but societies last. The first cell of life on this planet burned out ages ago, but life itself goes on. We will influence the future whether we want to or not, in ways we never anticipated.

Thank you for asking, Ms. McInnis. I accept that Art is deserving of many of the definitions often given for it. But I'm especially fond of referring to Art as a sort of soulful communication.

You speak of the emotions, and I do think that art must spring from the feeling part of us (with a bit of help from the thinking part, of course). But why do we not simply let it live inside of us? Why must we reproduce it, externally?

The reasons I've nodded at include "I just have to get it out of me, or it'll destroy me," "I have to see what it really looks like outside my own head," and "It's so powerful, I need to see others engage with it."

I'm especially fond of number three, because, as I see it, it doesn't make me special that I can express feeling, but it can be quite a special thing when that feeling (or, more accurately, the expression of that feeling) becomes shared.

I was watching "Lust for Life" on TCM yesterday, and I thought of Kirk Douglas's Van Gogh standing in front of a majestic field or meadow, painting what he saw, the way he saw it. There's a line in the movie where Van Gogh talks about the way he sees the life in such a natural scene. But why can't he just stand there and admire what he sees, tee-heeing with the special insight that a million grains of wheat reach for the sky and the sun burns golden in each? Why must he splash his interpretation onto the canvas? To see that he can do it? Or to share the moment and the knowledge and the feeling with the world?

I think there was a very artistic basis for Spielberg's need to make "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Roger touches on it best, when he's talking about Spielberg's need to "stick it to the Nazis."

And I know "E.T." is art, because I still remember seeing it at the local drive-in when I was two, sitting on Mom's lap and feeling a storm of emotion--fear, sadness, exhilaration--stir up inside of me.

I brought up Spielberg for perhaps obvious reasons. Do most of us think of "Raiders" as splendid art or only as wall-to-wall entertainment? And hasn't Spielberg's massive influence had the most lovely effect on our culture? When we see the Criterion DVD of "Armageddon" on the shelf next to "Amarcord," do we consider "Armageddon" art? Perhaps Michael Bay felt it was when he made it, but most audiences since wouldn't find themselves engaging in a soulful communication when they're watching it.

Oh, yes, the Coen brothers ... yes, I would consider "No Country for Old Men" one of the most excellent works of art the cinema has produced since, well, "Fargo." Easily one of the movies of the decade thus far. A senational meditation on good's slight inferiority to bad, life's ultimate surrender to death.

I'm not, however, a fan of "The Big Lebowski," "The Man Who Wasn't There," and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Were they art? Likely. But I think they were failed works of art. I simply didn't know what they were trying to do or be. I didn't get the message, I guess.

I'm going to combine my answers to both of your posts into one post. And also - if we continue this discussion, or meet someday in a different one, please call me "Liz." I don't know Ms. McInnis! ;-)

There may be as many reasons for birthing a piece of art as there are artists. But one reason might be that there is joy in expression. Look at a child dancing by herself to a song she loves. She is in the moment and feeling a type of joy. (The outward expression of art is done in the moment - which is probably why artists speak of losing time. They are so very in each moment they don't always feel the passing of time.)

But back to the original topic - a dance not performed is not a dance. Art is expression. It can't live only in one's head. Perhaps Van Gogh wanted to share his vision with the world - but during his lifetime, he had very little success with that, and still he painted. He painted for himself, first and foremost.

Which brings us to Armageddon, The Big Lebowski, and O, Brother. What is failed art? Were Van Gogh's paintings failed art because they weren't popular while he lived? We certainly think of them as art today. Were they not art when he was alive, but somehow became art later? That doesn't seem likely to me. They were art when they were born, or not art at all. Of course, I'm with the crowd that thinks they were art when they were born, regardless of how they were perceived by viewers at the time!

And I think the same of the above movies. I consider Armegeddon deeply flawed, and it doesn't speak to me. But it spoke to many people, the Criterion folks (apparently) among them. And while The Big Lebowski and O, Brother don't speak to you - they do speak to me. They are two of my favorite Coen movies. On the other hand, many (perhaps most) of Oliver Stone's movies - undoubtedly considered art by many people - don't speak to me at all. That's the wonderful thing about art. It owes nothing to any outsider - it doesn't have to speak to anyone but the artist. Of course, movies are a very expensive form of art to produce, so movie artists probably hope to appeal to more than just themselves! (Well, most movie artists. I wonder about Jim Jarmusch. He has at least one fan in me though. ;-)

Mr. Ebert, what were your last words?

Ebert: I'll get back to you on that.

Hi, Liz. Call me Ryan. So, your idea of art has to do with a sort of birth. I like that idea very much, and I think that even though I look at art as a sharing phenomenon, I can come over to your page and agree that art may be whatever a human perceiver deems it to be. Art is ours to define, is it not?

Just to clarify, when do you believe that art is born? Take the writing process, for instance. Every serious writer I know declares that writing is not about instantaneous creation, but a very lengthy and often arduous process of planning, construction, demolition, renovation, and cleanup; more like the building of a house than an explosion of creativity. Indeed, it may begin, as Doctorow says, with a "private excitement of the mind," but in order for the short story or poem or novel to take shape, you've no doubt experienced or witnessed that it may take years to feel real. Is art born only when the artist deems the work real? That may never occur, for the most demanding of writers, while the piece may be quite real, profound even, to readers.

I've enjoyed the discussion so far, Liz, and thanks, Roger, for indulging us.

To the first poster - I hate to sound like Clinton, but it depends on what your definition of 'sound' is. A falling tree will produce pressure waves through the air. If no human (or something with a mechanism to pick up those waves, like an ear drum, and a brain to translate those waves) is around, did the tree make a sound? I believe not - unless we agree that sound is simply pressure waves.

Yes, the tree lived, died, and possibly affect simply by its presence. But that has nothing to do with sound. What you are asking is... if Man never came near this tree, did the tree have any direct meaning?

Ebert: Guy goes in to a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist says, "You're crazy!"
Guy says, "I want a second opinion!"
Psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly!"
By Richard Kaufman on February 12, 2009 12:25 AM
Roger, you're missing a word at the end of the "crazy" joke that makes it funnier.
Try this version: I've added only the final word, but that's the way I've always heard it.
Ebert: Guy goes in to a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist says, "You're crazy!"
Guy says, "I want a second opinion!"
Psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly too!"
Ebert: Never add a word after the punch word. Steps on the laugh.

That exchange puts me in mind of a story Dick Cavett (I believe) tells about writing jokes for Art Linkletter (again, that's a maybe). The original joke was, "You know, there's a lot of famous comedy teams out there: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason ..."

On the air, however, Linkletter not only steps on the punchline, but squashes it into jelly: "You know, there's a lot of famous comedy teams out there: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and big fat Jackie Gleason."

And as long as we're on the subject, few comedy tutorials top the one delivered by Mark Linn-Baker as Benjy Stone to Jessica Harper in My Favorite Year. I particularly like the fact that he's uses it to win her over.

Oh, yeah, the joke itself (ancient, but still spry): "A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office with a duck on his head, and the psychiatrist asks, "Can I help you?" and the duck says, "Yeah, can you get this guy off my ass?"

I don't got a million of 'em, but they're out there.

Ebert: Lady goes into a bar with a duck under her arm.

Bartender says, "Hey, where'd you get the pig?"

Lady says, "It's a duck!"

Bartender says, "I was talking to the duck."