Day 4

“Death, thou shalt die”: About literature & film

2009: I write, therefore I read. Yes, I do like to read even though not as much as I would like to. Every year I have a list of books I want to read. Sadly to say but by the end of the year I’m still working on the first or second book. For instance, last year I bought a second hand copy of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of loss (I love that title) after I’ve borrowed it at the library and failed to finish it by the time I had to return it. I am still working on it. Another book on my reading list is The Life of Pi, which I finished half way and after reading the end (which I often do anyway regardless if the book is good or not) kind of gave up on it. During my trips to India I also bought books by Indian authors. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is one of them. The list goes on.

2001: In the movie Wit Emma Thompson portraits Professor Vivian Bearing, a patient suffering from stage 4 terminal ovarian cancer. Being a scholar and a professor, specializing in 17^th English poetry and John Donne’s holy sonnets especially, she reacts to the news about her illness with a matter-of-fact. As her illness and treatment progress, she is trying to analyze the situation as well as she is looking back upon important situations in her past. One of these situations is a discussion, or rather a speech given by her mentor, Professor Evelyn “E.M” Ashford (Eileen Atkins) about the meaning of the Holy sonnet 10 of John Donne. Death, as John Donne intended it in the poem according to her mentor, is simply a pause, a comma. There’s a difference between a semicolon, an exclamation mark and a comma. The real meaning of these lines as John Donne intended it were simply: “And death shall be no more [comma] Death, thou shalt die.”

Literature inspires movies and movies inspire us to read literature. Literature inspires life. After all, isn’t poetry the stuff that dreams are made of? Or was it the opposite?

2000: I was working on my closing arguments in a thesis of comparative literature. I was analyzing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a modernist novel about life, love and death. One morning I got a call from my mother. Our beloved grandmother had passed away. I had read nearly 1200 pages of Virginia Woolf who ended her life by suicide, and I was now discussing the last chapter in The Waves. I remember thinking how untimely the death of my grandmother somehow was linked to the last chapter of the book and the conclusion of the thesis. Life, death. As I was collecting my thoughts, I jumped on a plane to Oslo. The funeral was held the next day. It was short. It wasn’t until the end of the ceremony, as the casket was about to be carried out, that I finally started crying. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally”

2007: My first novel When The Tigers Smoked (Da tigrene røykte) is finally released in Norway after years in the making. I can finally say, I write, therefore I am. Debut novels are considered as literary events in Norway. They are actually read and reviewed. Most of the debutantes are interviewed as well. Why do you write? What inspires you? For me, writing is to fill an empty space. Being an adoptee from South-Korea, I had to start with being me. What does this mean? Yes, I was abandoned. Yes, I was in orphanage. I have lived with questions about my birth parents and my birth country my whole life. This does not mean that I necessarily want to write about. So I tried to write about something else for over 10 yeas until it finally dawned upon me: This is lying. This is not me. After realizing this, it was always more difficult to write. But at the same time it felt more important.

2009: I always find it interesting to watch movies that portray writers. The best ones are witty and ironic. The bad ones are self-conscious. The worst ones are faking it. Typically they will have a writer’s block, sitting for hours in front of the computer unable to type even a short sentence. (This painful state of mind is of course shortened down to minutes). And then, life begins. Or does it really?

In Wit, the only person caring for Vivian’s Bearings health is the head nurse Susie Monahan. Here is another example of life and literature:
Vivian Bearing: I trust this will have a soporific effect.
Susie Monahan: I don't know about that, but it sure makes you sleepy.
Vivian Bearing: [laughing] Soporific means 'makes you sleepy'.

In Wit, Vivian Bearing dies alone, reciting John Donne one more time. “And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.” Poetry does inspire life or something like it. At least I was able to read a poem today. And so I can make another list.