4.06.2010

Cuse, Lindelof, Kundera

A striking majority of the good shit I come across nowadays reminds me tangentially of LOST (admittedly, sometimes it's simply that I think LOST is good shit and that other good shit has at least that in common... I'm simple).

But here's a quote from Milan Kundera (from "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting") that I think relates really well to the morally gray genius of LOST:

"To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.

Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world.

Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils (as I believed when I was a child) but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels' power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils' reign), we could not live either."


The next bit is about the origin of laughter being the devil's domain. I won't type it all out because I'm lazy, but maybe check out "The B of L and F" and see for yourself!
Some people (cough-me-cough) will scramble to read "Bad Twin" just because they see Sawyer reading it on the beach... and that's a great thing! My thinking is there's no limit what books can teach us about television. Soak it in, folks. And thank YOU, Lost.

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