Roger Ebert. Life Itself
On Shakespeare
The autumn of 1966 was a conscious leave-taking from the univer-sit: Many of my friends were gone. My graduate courses in English had a nevseriousness and could no longer be finessed without actual work.
I had the good fortune to enroll in a class on Shakespeare's tragedies, taught by G. Blakemore Evans, who was a legendary Shakespearean. It was then that Shakespeare took hold of me, and it became clear he was the nearest we have come to a voice for what it means to be human.
I confessed to Wasson that I hadn't read most of Shakespeare, and he observed that the plays were not terribly long. If you read a play every Sunday morning it would take thirty-eight weeks. I started, and after I went to Cape Town I plunged in deeply, in reading that was a form of prayer.
On teacher of literature
I was to take every class Curley offered, including Fiction Writing› where one of the other students was Larry Woiwode, then obviously already the real thing. Curley read our stories aloud anonymously, to encourage open discussion. There was never any doubt who wrote Woi-wode's. Curley introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life's reading: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor's House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury. One day he handed out a mimeographed booklet of poems by E. E. Cummings, and told us to consider the typography as musical notations for reading the poems aloud. Cummings ever after was clear to me, and I know dozens of his poems by heart.
He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed felicities of language, patterns of symbolism, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose.
On mortification
My early role models were my father and Dan Curley. He appeared in my life almost precisely when my father died, and it occurs to me that he must have known that. Did he understand the need he began to fill? He spoke to us once of the "first-rate second-rate writer," someone who was good but not quite that good: John O'Hara or Sinclair Lewis, perhaps. In my junior or senior year, filled with myself, infatuated with my weekly column in the Daily Illini, I reviewed his latest novel A Stone Man, Yes and described him as a first-rate second-rate writer. How could I have done this? How could I have been so cruel to a man who had been so kind? I had been his student for twenty-six credit hours. He was my friend. I did not possess the right to publish such a thing. Sherman Paul, another professor I idolized, stood next to me at the coffeepot in the English Seminar Room and drily observed, "That must have taken some nerve."
On Werner Herzog
It was clear to him what his his mission was. It was to film the world through personalities of exalted eccentrics who defied all ordinary categories and sought a transcendent vision. Every one of his films has followed that same mission.
By then I'd seen The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in the Chicago International Film Festival, and I felt a connection with Herzog's work that went beyond critic and film. We shared an obsession. He engaged with the infuriating relationship between the human will and the intractable universe. Each film, in a new way, dealt with the fundamental dilemma of consciousness: We know we are here, we know what we see, we learn what we can, we try to do more than is possible, we fail, but we have glimpsed a vision of the infinite. That sounds goofy and New Age, but there is no more grounded filmmaker than Herzog. He founds his work on the everyday realities of people who, crazy or sane, real or fictional, are all equally alive to him.
In 1999, the Walker Art Center screened a month of Herzog's filme and then scheduled a Q & A for the final night. I think we were onstage two and a half hours. He's a spellbinding speaker. He speaks with a naked sincerity that is sort of entrancing. He says extraordinary things in a matter-of-fact way. That night he read out his "Minnesota Declara-tion," which he had written for the occasion. Subtitled "Lessons of Dark-ness" after one of his films, it consisted of twelve points, some of which were funny. ("The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.") Some were bleak. ("We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.") The last one remorseless. ("Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species-including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.")
He said the point of the declaration was to define "ecstatic truth," by which he meant a truth above the mundane. Cinema verité, he said,
"confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones." He explained:
"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." This was consistent with his lifelong practice of ignoring the boundaries between his fiction films and documentaries.
P414
O'Rourke's had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and
under it this quotation, which I memorized:
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the
summer.
That does a pretty good job of summing it up. "Kindness" covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
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