27 posts tagged never let me go
Mom: This guy isn’t really good-looking at all.
Me: Well yeah I guess not right now. He’s supposed to be sick.
Mom: No, not ever! Don’t get your obsession.
Me:
It’s cold here in Houston and we’re a bunch of wimps so I’m staying in tonight. But, I’ve convinced my mom to watch ‘Never Let Me Go’ with me. So, I probably won’t be on again tonight because I’ll be dealing with the inevitable existential crisis that comes after watching this film.
(via frontiercity)
Andrew’s face
Because of the impact this film had on me, I’ve been unable to express what I’ve wanted to say about it — until tonight.
At dinner tonight, my friend asked me how I would describe Never Let Me Go and I said,
It’s a playful romp through the English countryside. Harry Potter meets Pineapple Express.
I can’t be held responsible for what I was saying. It was late and I may have been delirious.
Over a year ago I began a project in which I pledged to analyze one Shakespeare sonnet everyday until I made it through all of his sonnets. You see, I had never read a single sonnet of his, and when I finally decided to do it, I wanted to do it right.
I want to be intimate with the works of William Shakespeare, which must include his plays and his sonnets. This notebook will exist with the sole purpose of being my container of all things Shakespeare.
I’ve purchased a book of his sonnets and currently possess five of his plays.
By the end of this process, I hope that his words will have infiltrated my psyche and shaped the way I form my words. I will transcribe each of his sonnets, pepper them with my own annotations and then write a brief response/personal analysis of each one. I will try to do one a day (and will date my entries for this journal) but want to do no less than four per week.
If anybody happens to read these notes, I hope the mind of Shakespeare and the mind of Courtney Leigh leave you with some small insights by the time we’re all done here.
How ambitious of me! And how naive.
One a day got changed to four per week got changed to one per week got changed to a year later, and I’m only on Sonnet 18. I hadn’t realized what a challenge I’d gotten myself into.
Shakespeare is so whiney!
I have vowed not to look at any of my previous entries until I finish all of his sonnets, but I do know that they contain a lot of mental resistance on my part. I find myself constantly disagreeing with his sentiments and waiting for him to move on to another subject.
Today, however, I had a break through. Thanks in part to Never Let Me Go and also to the music of Johnny Flynn. You see, I have been flooding my mind with these two things, and today I decided to get back to my sonnets. Don’t ask me what inspired me because I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was just that I have been so enmeshed in the things that inspire me that a subconscious part of me wanted to give the sonnets another go. Shakespeare is all about inspiration, right?
As I waded through Sonnet 18, something began blossoming in my mind. Soon I was off on a tangent of how our surroundings are inseparable from our ‘selves’ and how we are all connected through the things around us and how they seep into us and are pushed back out into the world with our own flavor wrapped around and through them.
Naturally, I started thinking about Never Let Me Go which is all about people that do the things they do because that is the life they are given. And even when they question their lives, there is no desire to escape. Only Tommy, a child-like and naive character, has any sort of violent reaction to his inevitability (which, when you think about it, we all share). His gut-wrenching, terrible, King Lear-esque cry of futility marks the existence of struggle.
But for Shakespeare, for me, for Johnny Flynn - for ANY artist - the struggle is every day. Because what makes humans special is this small, often overlooked entity. It exists everywhere. It is so tiny sometimes, but its power is astronomical, unquantifiable. Without this one small thing, I do believe humankind would be quite a different animal. Wild. Cruel. Ignorant. Broken.
This thing! This thing that forces us to evolve, forces us to struggle, to keep fighting for something… something else… something better. This thing that keeps us sane and civilized and centered. That brings us together until we can do nothing but cling to it and to each other. Until we can NEVER LET GO.
This thing is hope.
Everything exists in those four letters. Everything.
Point is, I’m back into the sonnets. I’m full of hope. Full of being alive.
Everyone should read this because it was beautiful. The end.
Never Let Me Go
600 plays
I guess we’re all a bunch of masochists.
“What I’m not sure about is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through. Or feel we’ve had enough time.”
