2026-03-26
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Rudely awakened

  "We fell asleep sweetly in one world and were rudely awakened in
  another" -- Ulysses' Gaze (1995), Theo Angelopulous

I've been reaching back in my memory to the year 2012. Lots of
challenging things happened then -- both professionally and personally
in many ways. It was a warm Italian night sometime in the middle of
August when I first encountered Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze -- a
critically acclaimed Greek film that had been recommended to me by a
colleague, as a challenge of sorts. It left me with a relatively rare
sense of awe. Fourteen years have passed, and it came back to me for
reasons that are probably more meaningful than I'd like to admit. The
movie is filled with nostalgia, history, sorrow, and cultural
references that make it even richer in meaning -- at least that's how
I received it then. Perhaps it's a sign of an overall pattern: a
crisis of meaning that modern societies struggle with without even
realizing it. The temporary nature of life and everything in it is
something we all know as a fact and rarely question. And for good
reason, but it takes a certain amount of time and experience to truly
realize it. Accepting it, however, is a different story. After all,
accepting the inevitable is perhaps the ultimate measure of maturity.