A status not unlike Marcello's.
To ask Marcello: what's wrong with your life? You got a job; you got women; you got friends; what else do you want? A peaceful mind? A meaningful existence? Sometimes I can't help blaming the intellectuals, the philosophers and the rich guys for stirring up disconnection, estrangements and sterility in the society. They always over stretch their intelligence, though not particularly to the detriment of anyone, to make life more unbearable.
The world was cast into the abyss of hysteria. On Saturday I watched Mission Impossible 4, in which the threat of nuclear war was looming and Tom Cruise had to accomplish the impossible mission to save the world. A typically saint-like character, a symbol of assurance and competence nowadays no one would boast anymore, not even Jesus or Madonna. Devoid of soundness and peace, how would the world end? If we cannot communicate to angels or humans, if the presence of gods is to be only regarded as a kind of mockery or scorn, how would we embrace our long sought-for eternity?
Maybe Steiner's made a good choice, hasn't he? He cut short his burnt-out existence, and killed any sad possibilities for his lovely children. To him, the continuation of human-beings, each new generation achieving their ancestors' dreams, till one day we become affluent, we look splendid, we create arts and contemplate upon history is just a joke. Our future won't prosper, our prospects being as bleak as ever, from the hard-boiled Zampanὸ, to the intellectual Steiner.
Sometimes I have to applaud the simplification and heroism of Hollywood. Naïve and retarded as it might be, it serves, like the seductive Sylvia, the strongest anesthesia, to numb our intelligence and endless contemplation. If we, as modern men, are destined to be shackled with the secularism and materialism, why not just throw ourselves into the arms of Bacchus, then, to enjoy the feasting and revelry in the forest of Rome, till our fine.
Yet how this world, in which commercialism is preferred to intellectualism, expressionism to neo-realism, Sylvia to Gelsomina will end? I can't wait to see.
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