Consolations: Love is an Art of Time1988

Consolations (Love is an Art of Time) comprises The Fugitive Gods, The Lighted Clearing, and The Body and the World. “For behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. And now, go, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever” (Isaiah 5:17, 30:8). This quotation was presented to me as the final paragraph of a review of Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World. I have read it as bidding me how to complete The Book of All the Dead and so cite it here as a note on Consolations. Consolations is about resentment and its overcoming, that is, about the overcoming of the pastness of the past through grasping its presentness and through a thankful submission to the Wholly Other, since nothing is more obvious than that Hell is to be one’s own. (RBE)

Three films based on reading Dante’s Purgatorio. The traveller emerges from Hell and arrive at a mountain “where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.”  The films express the view that that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love. The landscapes the films depict are forbidding, but the tone of the voice-over and supertitles is one of waiting and hope. (RBE)