Blogging Volumes

The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning.  How can this be true?  Allow me to properly introduce Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence”. In his book The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks: ‘What if a demon were to say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you?”’ Nietzsche thought that was the most terrifying prospect in all philosophy. Dark is constructed around this idea. Every 33 years, the same tragedy happens in the town of Winden: children disappear. For a small town like that, where everyone knows everyone else, such an incident can cause immense grief, and indeed, for one of the relatives, it could spark enough rage to make them attempt to murder a child with a rock. If reality was cyclical, then tragedy would be unavoida...

If the beginning is the end, where does that leave the middle?  It’s the in-between, the gap, the looping path that leads from one bang! to the other; the middle is where all instability, all fluctuation, all the churning motions of entropy do their work. It’s where we live, the only place we’ll ever know.  It’s chaos.  *** John Milton’s follow-up to Paradise Lost , a shorter poem called Paradise Regained , doesn’t really live up to its name. Paradise doesn’t make a single appearance in the poem; it’s been lost forever, and not a single character attempts to rebuild it.  The story takes place hundreds of years after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. It follows a teenage Jesus Christ on his lonely expedition through the desert, during which he meets Satan, who attempts to tempt Jesus into sinning. It’s a much less exciting premise than your average epic poem, but that’s kind of the point: Milton wants to contrast Jesus’ brand of heroism with the kind usually c...

This blog cycle contains spoilers for Dark, Paradise Lost, and the future of our planet. “The beginning is the end.” That phrase, along with many other vague wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey lines, is eternally recurring in Netflix’s German sci-fi show Dark . The show takes place in three different time periods, 33 years apart from one another, in the small town of Winden, whose distinguishing feature is a giant nuclear power plant.  Oh, and it also has a cave that transports people back and forth through time. At the end of the first season, someone from 2019 crawls through that cave and arrives in the year 2052. Everything he finds there is grey. Ash blows through the air; trees wither without leaves, their bark scorched black; small bands of rugged, ragged humans scramble in packs through the remains. You can guess what had happened to the town’s biggest feature. The show describes the nuclear plant’s explosion as the ‘Apocalypse’, a word that refers to the complete final destruction o...

There's a word in Japanese, tsundoku, which describes the habit of buying piles and piles of books, only to never read them. To enter a charity bookshop is to tempt tsundoku. For over a year, I've volunteered in the book room at an Oxfam shop in Darlington; in that time, I've acquired 73 second-hand books, 51 DVDs, a pair of headphones, a shirt, and copious amounts of fairtrade fudge. The only thing I've not still got in my room is the fudge. It seems tsundoku has gotten the better of me. To be fair to myself, I have read 39 of those books, and watched around 30 of the DVDs, so they're not wasted purchases. Far from it; I feel like, for the value I've drawn from these items, I should've spent so much more than I did. Oxfam prices all of its fiction from upwards of 99 pence. So, with nearly all of my second-hand books coming from Oxfam, that means I've spent roughly eighty quid on second-hand books this year. I'm going to pinch an idea from George Orw...