Reading: Middlemarch. The end is in sight

Listening: Cocteau Twins, The Pink Opaque

Watching: Cube"

Moving:

24 August 2002: Cube

After reading some description of the movie "Cube," I set Tivo searching for it. It premiered on IFC not long after, but knowing that it wasn't going to be an upper, I didn't watch it for weeks.

Sartre meets Terry Gilliam crossed with The House of Stairs. It felt like No Exit not just because of the inescapable hellishness but also because of the play-like feel enforced by the 14' cube setting. The dystopia and absurdity were Gilliamesque, and the structure, the danger, and the formation and breakdown of alliances were Sleatory (ratcheted beyond the YA level, though).

There's a lot of math. I was in the dark when someone said there are 3 factors of 30. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, and 30? Or is 1 assumed and the latter four dismissed as multiples of 2, 3, or 5? "Pi" intrigued me theoretically until it despaired of itself, but I think that's the director's raison d'être.

Anyway it got me wondering about the limits of human ability. When someone beginning with B broke the four-minute mile in the 1920s,* three others broke it immediately thereafter. A psychological boundary, maybe? But because human bodies work efficiently only within a range, there must be a lower limit on how fast a human can run a mile.

(*That's what I remembered off the top of my head. His name is Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister and he did it in 1954 and he's not dead yet. I must have been thinking of "Chariots of Fire.")

(I recently came across a discussion of Ayn Rand that reminds me that my imposing a limit on human physical ability would be to deny the ability of the God-Man. How Collective of me. In Atlas Shrugged, two scenes sicken me--at least, but for now, in this context: when Hank avoids a car accident by the strength of his will, even though this requires his car to violate physical laws (I might remember this wrong, but that's how it feels); and when Dagny and Hank realize Their True Love because each of them has always thought that by the time the sun burns out, humans (read men) will have figured a replacement. That's sacrilegious.)

The math, I should say, got me thinking about those limits. Is there a limit on what math, what computations, a person can do in her head?

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And I finally finished Middlemarch. I enjoyed it throughout, however much I interrupted it. It was less about Dorothea and more about the town, which is probably why the title is Middlemarch not Dorothea. It's Dickensian, with relationships among several unexpected people, a huge cast, and goofy names. You know that anyone named Raffles isn't going to be good-natured. These features might not be Dickensian but just Victorian; it's just that the only other Victorian novelist I've read is Thomas Hardy. Who feels much different. I still want to read Vanity Fair but I really should read Pilgrim's Progress first. Bleah.

The characterization, so detailed, so precise, never falters. She goes deeper and deeper into her characters, showing motivation and thought process, and everything everyone does is exactly what they would do. Considering how large the cast and how complex the interconnections, the novel impresses me even more.

So I started Atonement. Amazing from the first sentence.