Somehow, getting all my work done in advance never means
having extra free time. It’s one of those great mysteries of life, like the
fact that delegating work is more work that just doing it yourself. Someone
should (if no one has) write the saga of an epic quest where the hero sets out
to find ‘where does the time go.’ In any case.
This week was busy partly because I was attempting to do as
little as possible on Easter weekend. It worked to some extent; I didn’t do
(much of) anything on Easter. I also took a break on Thursday night and went to
see Batman v Superman with a friend. I wasn’t expecting DC to come up with
something fun for the whole family, but I was expecting it to leave me with
interesting fodder for philosophy, and I wasn’t disappointed. The movie itself
had its moments, too.
What are a few of the thoughts it stirred? For one, I am
considering the idea that sci-fi/superhero stories are our modern-day version
of mythology, our fairy tales and myths. It seems to me that the most important
aspects of fantasy stories are 1) that they take place in a superworld, where
amazing things (though not anything) can happen, and 2) that they clarify the
world for us: they bring good and evil to the surface and make the fight
between them clear. And that’s what superheroes are.
I also noticed that all the parts I liked most in the movie
– and in Man of Steel, which I re-watched afterwards – were ripped directly
from the Easter story. I was entirely distracted from the plot by the Christ
imagery at the climax of Batman v Superman, although I can’t go into more
detail without spoilers. But I don’t mean the obvious visual parallels; I mean
the more subtle plot parallels. You’ll have to watch the movie to figure out
what I’m talking about.
I went to church on Easter Sunday morning with friends,
after which we stopped for breakfast, and then headed home for a day of
meditation and prayer. I’d been fasting for Easter weekend, so I thoroughly
enjoyed the Easter candy my mom sent back with me. We’ve had fairly good weather
the past few days, although it’s gray and rainy now, so I also returned to the
lake and walked around for a couple of hours on Saturday. It was a good
weekend.
In Arabic, we’re studying the relative effectiveness of
violent and non-violent resistance to injustice. We haven’t come to a
conclusion, perhaps because most of our time is taken up with midterm
presentations on various topics. The election cycle is a popular
subject-matter; if you came into our class, you would hear a bunch of hesitant
Arabic phrases punctuated with words we don’t know: “republican primary,”
“indictment,” “progressive,” “private sector,” and etc.
In atheism, we’re reading Nietzsche. I realized I didn’t
know that much about his view before; he consciously says
seemingly-contradictory things, and his writing has been used to argue for so
many different things that it’s hard to tell what he actually said, especially
because he was trying to avoid stating anything absolutely. I actually agree
with him on a lot, but we come to different conclusions. This seems to happen
to me a lot.
In ROTC, we’re doing our semester evaluations, which means
I’m very busy, but I’ve had an opportunity to get perspective on the year. Once
again I realize how much ROTC can teach me about leadership; it offers a rare
chance for significant responsibility and people-management that I haven’t
really had anywhere else except JROTC. I’ve also started thinking about my next
set of resolutions (my New Year’s resolutions were designed to be modified
after this semester).
I think one thing I need to work on is joy – not in the
general happy sense, or in C. S. Lewis’s very particular sense, but in the
normal Christian sense. Christ is risen. More than that, existence is good at
its core, made by a good God. The story ends in happily ever after, whatever
happens in the middle. Good wins over evil, and joy wins over loss and
brokenness. I need to start acting that out.
One of the main complains with DC superhero movies is that
they’re ‘joyless.’ The good guys don’t beat the bad guys and then everyone goes
home; there’s a cost, not just physically, but spiritually. You don’t come out
without scars. They’re not wrong; if you step back and look at the real world, none
of us comes out untouched. But that’s the promise of Easter – that there is
coming a Joy so great it can overwhelm even this.
Pictures:
No one ever seems to take pictures of the back door of Annenberg. It's pretty impressive.
At the movie theater:
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