Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Daniel Ross Goodman

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      Being in the image of God, according to Soloveitchik, means that human beings possess a God-like creative capacity. To exercise that capacity is to actualize one’s own inner godliness; not to exercise this capacity is to fail to realize one’s potential as a creature in the image of God. The “concept of the obligatory nature of the creative gesture—of self-creation as an ethical norm, an exalted value”—was an idea that “Judaism introduced into the world,” writes Soloveitchik. The stakes are great, and Renoir appears to have been catalyzed by this notion.

      Rabbi Soloveitchik believed that human creative powers were best utilized in the service of chidush: novel interpretations of text. Renoir believed that human creative powers were best utilized in the service of painting—and if one couldn’t paint, then in making shoes, in binding a book, or in crafting a piece of pottery—in creating something that a person could hold in his or her hands, “something that would last.”

      Soloveitchik, though, also believed that human beings must use their creative capacities on their own selves: “God wills man to be a creator—his first job is to create himself as a complete being.” And, as Abraham Joshua Heschel stated toward the end of his life, one should “build a life as if it were a work of art. . . . Start working on this great work called your own existence.” As far as Pierre-Auguste was concerned, the process of creating art was the means through which one achieved self-creation.

      As the elder Renoir was in painting, so was his son in film: the acclaimed director Jean Renoir created himself by crafting artistic films of enduring cinematic value. Even though he was destined to become one of the greatest directors of early cinema, Jean Renoir himself doubted whether film could ever be “artistic.” During the film, we hear Jean expressing profound concern about whether film could ever approach the aesthetic and intellectual plane of painting. “Film is not for us French, it’s for the masses,” he worries about his chosen field of art. “We have too much artistic baggage.” Yet, with triumphs of the celluloid such as La Règle du jeu, he would go on to prove himself—and other early cinema skeptics—startlingly wrong.

      Jean Renoir and the film Renoir alike make the argument that a film, just as much as a painting, can be a lasting work of art. An actor who creates a poignant theatrical performance with his or her voice, body, and gestures, and a director who captures these actions on film, edits them, and shapes them into an aesthetically valuable work of cinema, engage in creative acts as significant as the art of painting. And indeed, just as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings have lasted, Jean Renoir’s films have endured the test of time. Both have become works of art that people can “hold in their hands.”

      “You can’t understand painting,” said Renoir. “You have to feel it.” After viewing Renoir, one goes from merely understanding the painter to nearly achieving a sensuous feeling of the great sui generis Impressionist himself.

      Note

      1.

      R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Agency [Sh’liḥut],” in Yemei Zikaron (Aliner Library; WZO, Dept. of Torah Education & Culture; Jerusalem: Orot, 1986), 9–28.

      Chapter 3

       The End of the Tour

      “It may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever,” says David Foster Wallace (as played by Jason Segel) at a key moment in The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s poignant film about the brilliant late writer. He continues:

      It’s just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and that there was actually nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, yet you were worse because you couldn’t function.

      Anyone who has ever read David Foster Wallace knows that the man behind the propulsive prose must have had demons upon demons. If reading Virginia Woolf is like eating chocolate and reading Toni Morrison is like drinking wine, reading David Foster Wallace is like taking drugs. One gets an inexplicable high from reading his writing; like an intensely flavorful amphetamine, it keeps readers coming back to his peerless prose again and again.

      The man himself, the twentieth-century’s literary Mozart behind the bandana, suffered throughout his abbreviated existence from such a severe form of depression that he eventually took his own life at the age of forty-four. The tragedy of his life is that he was never able to escape the very same demons that may have inspired him to create his incomparable brand of extremely addictive writing.

      Tragic Brilliance

      Jason Segel portrays the famed writer with the correct amount of candor and reserve, sprinkling in Wallace’s palpable existential anxiety at strategic moments while never losing track of his acutely self-aware way of analyzing every encounter. The premise of the film, which recounts Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s (Jesse Eisenberg) five-day interview with Wallace at the end of Wallace’s 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest, seems simple. But with Wallace, nothing was ever simple. Lipsky eventually wrote a bestselling book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, based on his interviews with Wallace. In addition to any ironic or existential meaning it holds, the book’s title, which is taken from a Wallace quote, turns out to be an apt description of Jesse Eisenberg’s performance in this film (and in nearly all of his films), where he usually ends up playing a version of himself.

      The real revelation is the excellent screenplay of Donald Margulies. The film has an intimate, theater-like quality to it. It almost seems that the movie might work better as a two-man play; it is thus not surprising to learn that Margulies has written for the stage. The other real surprise is Segel, who depicts Wallace as a man consciously and subconsciously crying out for meaning in his life. Segel portrays Wallace as a man who had experimented with so many ways of living and so felt as if he had exhausted them that by the age of twenty-eight he was already waging an inner war with himself—a war that eventually led him to end his life.

      Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Wallace’s life is that—for all his brilliance—he could never find a means of filling the dry void in his life with the waters of meaning. According to rabbinic legend, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro experimented with every manner of idolatry and religion then available before finding the faith of Moses. Like Jethro, Wallace experimented with an infinite number of ways of life, but he never seemed to find the way that would have saved him from himself.

      Loneliness, Suicide, and Religion

      Long before the alienation and ennui that afflicted Wallace’s Generation X, the acclaimed sociologist Émile Durkheim diagnosed the ills that were plaguing his own generation in the late nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years before the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace’s epic novel about loneliness and alienation, the French-born founder of the modern discipline of sociology produced an epic study of suicide.

      In his 1897 work, Durkheim found that suicide rates were higher among Protestants than they were among Catholics and Jews. Durkheim’s interpretation of this disparity was startling. In his view, Protestants tended to commit suicide in higher proportions because their faith fostered a greater sense of individualism. This, in turn, led to higher rates of the crippling side effect of loneliness—or, as Durkheim termed it, “anomie” (transmuted into French from the Greek anomos, “lawless,” and defined as “the lack of social or ethical standards in an individual or group”). Durkheim posited that Catholics and Jews committed suicide less frequently СКАЧАТЬ