Blind Chance (Przypadek)

 

Director Krzysztof Kieślowski (center)

BLIND CHANCE (Przypadek)           A                                                                                     aka: The Accident                                                                                                                Poland  (122 mi)  1981  d: Krzysztof Kieślowski

I don’t really know why there wasn’t any true description of Poland in the 1970’s in the other arts.  There wasn’t even a proper description of it in literature, and literature is easier to produce than film.  It’s not subject to censorship to the same degree although individual writers or individual books might be.  Yet films offered the best description of Poland.  At the end of 1970’s I realized that this description was limited, that we had reached these limits and that there was no point in describing this world any further.  A result is ‘Blind Chance,’ which is no longer a description of the outside world but rather of the inner world.  It’s a description of the powers which meddle with our fate, which push us one way or another.                                      —Krzysztof Kieślowski, 11 October* film & talk: Krzysztof Kieślowski – Blind Chance ...

Poland has the unfortunate distinction of having been invaded in 1939 by Nazi Germany from the West while also by Russia days later from the East, becoming the center of the Holocaust during the war, where Auschwitz will forever be linked with one of the worst atrocities in human history.  The population experienced horrific oppression by both occupying forces, with the Russians eventually prevailing afterwards, yet the aftermath left a moral void that still reverberates today, though Polish artists today enjoy Western-style freedom.  Context is essential with this film, as the director was born into the Poland of WWII, where it took him three tries to gain acceptance into the Łódź Film School, while this film is a product of the political anxiety of its time, going hand-in-hand with the long-exiled Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz (the prize awarded a year prior to the making of this film) and his book entitled The Captive Mind, a study of the capitulation of artists to the demands of Stalinism, as Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the supreme artists in cinema and Polish history, where this revelatory work early in his career beautifully speaks to the malaise of a nation, introducing prevalent themes that are expanded in his later efforts, shot during the Russian communist occupation, yet remains timeless and strikingly modernist.  This film illuminates the intersection of fate, coincidence, and choice, suggesting chance rules our lives as much as choice does, examining how a single innocuous event can irrevocably alter our lives forever, offering three distinctly different outcomes in the life of a young medical student as he runs to catch a train in Łódź to Warsaw, none of which lead to a desirable result.  In one he joins the communist party, hoping to make an impact, defining himself by his commitment to the cause, yet he inadvertently harms the ones he loves the most, in another he’s arrested and sent to a labor camp where he bands together with associates he meets in an underground movement resisting the communist authority, yet is thoroughly ineffective, while in the third he returns to his life in Łódź and becomes a family man, establishing a successful medical career, yet he’s completely apolitical, refusing to take sides, nonetheless his life is deeply impacted in ways outside his control.  In each he establishes a different group of friends (with actors revolving into different roles), a different career, a different love interest, and takes on decidedly different political views, yet none bring him happiness.  Influenced by Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978), yet giving rise to Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998), Kieślowski developed innovative narrative forms and stylistic methods to address pressing existential, moral, and political issues that reflected conditions in Poland at the time, living under the repressive Stalinist machinations of communism, a kind of outdated, old-world relic that transplanted itself to Poland, leaving few options, as individual free will in a totalitarian society is simply steamrolled out of existence, easily crushed under relentless pressure to conform.  Kieślowski began his career making short black and white documentaries, yet concluded making sumptuously elegant features, committed early on to the principles of realism, where this film reflects the moral dilemma of life under communism, where there really is no choice at all, as bowing down to the pressures of authority is the only available option, yet each new generation seeks an alternative path, one that doesn’t yet exist, overwhelmed by the absurdities of existence, as totalitarianism dominates every aspect of one’s life, where being suspicious of your neighbors is an everyday reality.  Ordinary people’s lives were constantly under pressure, followed and surveilled by the police or their thugs, apartments routinely ransacked searching for seditious activity, arrested and accused of crimes you did not commit, confessing what you know about others to police in hopes of alleviating some of that strain is often the one and only option.  Although the movie was made in 1981 on the eve of martial law, whereupon it was immediately banned, it had its premiere in 1987 in a censored form, screening at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes (initially rejected as the work of a “local artist”), as the delay was caused by state-imposed censorship due to the film’s political content.  A recent restoration has returned the film to its original form, with one brief censored section of a police assault missing altogether, yet the sound remains.  The collapse of communism in 1989 was a major turning point, as films prior to that were all motivated by the strain of life under communism.  While other Polish filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi struggled to find funding and relevant subject material after 1989, Kieślowski’s career, long undervalued outside Poland, flourished, suddenly regarded as the vanguard of Eastern European art cinema, a worthy heir to Tarkovsky, discovering transnational cultural productions, where the worldwide acclaim for his film The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988) led to international coproductions, with his last four films made largely outside of Poland, and predominantly in French, while broadening the ethical and metaphysical questions of his earlier films.   

During the communist period, Polish cinema served as an antidote to the propaganda of state television, never more strongly than the cinema of moral anxiety of the late 70’s, also known as cinema of moral unrest, a grouping of blunt yet stylistically unembellished films that brought attention to the social ills of the nation, where people find themselves isolated and alone in a corrupt and dishonest society, yet the period was short-lived due to the imposition of martial law in 1981.  Andrzej Wajda paid homage to Kieślowski, claiming “When we were lost and confused during martial law, he alone knew which path to follow.”  His methods, a pronounced existential strain both stylistically and narratively, exposing the uncertainties of life and the impossibility of judging the lives of others, had a profound influence on other European directors, perhaps none more than the austere work of Austrian director Michael Haneke, emotionally spare, fractured in perspective, using long takes to accentuate a heightened realism.  After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the formation of the European Union, Haneke’s films explored the increasing isolation of the individual in a fragmented Europe, with Kieślowski’s THREE COLORS TRILOGY (1993-94) sharing similar themes with Haneke’s Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000), both sharing the same French actress Juliette Binoche, with both offering an insightful, modernist perspective of Europe from an informed Central European identity.  Like his earlier works, this film has a documentary quality, yet its realization of a cyclical Sisyphus syndrome where the central protagonist is doomed to repeated mistakes succinctly sums up the Cinema of Moral Anxiety era, with its irrationality of existence, where the search for hope and meaning is absurdly thwarted by a morally bankrupt and dehumanizing system, where one lives and dies meaninglessly, no matter the circumstances.  Kieślowski places great faith in chance encounters, reminding us of the significance this plays in our lives, in the determination of our character, even in who we meet, and how we meet them, considering all the possible “what if?” variables that might have gone another way, yet each life is a mysterious intersection with the hands of fate, where this film is a reminder that had things gone differently at some point we could be living entirely different lives.  A disjointed series of seemingly unrelated incidents start the film in a shockingly well-made opening montage, providing something of an abstract historical backstory connecting the memory of the past to the present, including traumatic childhood incidents (some remembered inaccurately) and a primal scream evoking a terrifying sense of helplessness and despair, though their interconnectedness is not actually realized until the final shot.  Given a grim, social realist look by cinematographer Krzysztof Pakulski, his camera is cleverly utilized, more active than previous works, displaying a sensual sensibility, mixing eroticism with a warm humanism, but through it all Witek (Bogusław Linda) remains optimistic in leading a good life, an apparent reference to Voltaire’s Candide, whose sole existence is guided by living the best of all possible worlds.  In each of three narratives, he tries to make the best ethical choices, seeking to live meaningfully, where if he cannot change the world, he can at least do his best not to let the world change him, which under a totalitarian regime would be a remarkable achievement, yet the intrusion of reality as an unstoppable force intervenes each time defying his efforts, leaving him disillusioned and heartbroken, casting the entire film under a darkened shadow of negativity.  Each segment opens with renewed possibilities full of hopes and promise, where it looks like Witek is in a position to choose his own destiny, as if the future is in his hands, yet he gradually gets caught up in a chain of events, accidents, and misfortunes that leave him exhausted, disappointed, and morally depleted.  There is a pronounced element of fatalism, one of the most toxic side-effects of living in a totalitarian system, as it dangerously pollutes the subconscious, perhaps best represented by a scene on the train where Witek follows a prisoner to the restroom, offering him a chance to escape, but the prisoner instead capitulates and willingly returns back to the authorities.  Throughout the film, however, this apparent disillusion with humanity is met with an equally mystifying faith in it, a remarkable characteristic from this director. 

While Poland is a devoutly Catholic country, Kieślowski was an agnostic, yet according to fellow Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who knew him well, “Krzysztof is somebody who had an incredibly deep need to believe in something transcendental.  He did believe, but at the same time he wasn’t really a member of any church, and his relationships toward the religious were less theological than ethical and metaphysical.”  Kieślowski reveals in the 1993 book Kieślowski On Kieślowski, a conversation with Danusia Stok, “given the limitation of our knowledge and the imperfection of our intelligence, there’s no way we can gauge the reality or the gravity of sin, the extent of guilt.”  What this suggests is that the only way we can escape the Sisyphean futility of utter human despair is to accept, at least hypothetically, the existence of a metaphysical point of view where things make more sense, as otherwise we will never be able to get out of the suffocating framework of “chance.”  Interestingly, one of the predominant themes of the film is stated early on from Werner (Tadeusz Łomnicki, a former member of the Party’s Central Committee), an old communist Witek meets on the train, who articulates this notion of the exhaustion of hope:

Every generation has need of light.  It needs to know, or to believe that the world can be a better place.  This need…is like a drug.  Early in life, it brings joy, as light seems near, within reach.  At life’s end, it brings bitterness, as the light has grown distant.  During those 40 years, I lived through many things, and today I see it more distant than before. […] But…life without this hope, without this bitterness, wouldn’t be worth living.

It’s curious that at the time this film was finally released in Poland in 1987, along with several other previously banned films, Polish film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski described it as “a souvenir of the past,” viewing it as a “pessimistic philosophical parable on human destiny shaped by occurrences beyond individual control,” relatable, supposedly, only to those still behind the Iron Curtain.  Yet the film is not some outdated nihilistic relic, actually transcending any notion of time and national boundaries precisely because it could come to represent any point of living under oppression, where according to Dennis Lim’s Criterion essay, Blind Chance: The Conditional Mood, “the failures of the system remain secondary to the human-scale dilemmas of the individuals trapped within it.”  Witek in all three segments is basically the same person, a kind of everyman who is morally upright, honest, and virtuous, trying to make the best of his life, where he’s a decent human being irrespective of his politics or life choices.  What’s quite astonishing, particularly in comparison with Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt), is that moral intent matters, and that ethical choices make a profound difference whether advocated by the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky or the Romantic Polish tradition of glorifying national martyrs, who are revered for believing in causes greater than themselves.  It is inevitable that all choices lead to death, where fate and death are interlinked, yet Kieślowski’s next film NO END (1985) is intrinsically a meditation on death and its haunting presence that continues to linger in our lives.  Yet what distinguishes this film is how essential ethical choice becomes in the human experience, elevating not only this film but the overall stature of Kieślowski as a filmmaker, as his films always feature philosophical journeys into the human spirit while demonstrating a concern for the moral and ethical implications of human action.  Accordingly, he confirmed his status as a major contemporary director with The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988), an ambitious series of ten hour-long films funded by Polish television, telling stories loosely based on the Ten Commandments, yet set in the heart of the modern existentialist world.  This ambiguous criss-cross narrative surpasses, to a large extent, the formulaic restrictions of the cinema of moral unrest by introducing larger-than-life themes into the equation, becoming a philosophical quest for knowledge, an internal odyssey of changing configurations, where Witek’s life revolves around three women, Czuszka (Bogusława Pawelec), his first love, Werka (Marzena Trybała), the sister of a childhood friend, and finally Olga (Monika Gozdzik), a fellow medical student that he marries.  Yet in such an over-controlled authoritative society, making no choice at all is synonymous with the status quo, as it offers no resistance to the continued offenses of the state, where Witek’s success is achieved at the expense of others, with the director highlighting the randomness of choice in an amusing scene showing a Slinky on the stairs, coming to life as it gracefully slithers effortlessly downward step-by-step until it comes to a stop at the bottom where it “looks dead.”  A point of emphasis should be made regarding an isolated scene where two jugglers appear in an open courtyard, with Witek watching them in awe, as their skill in generating a neverending back-and-forth stream of balls in the air is simply unfathomable.  The significance of this scene may easily be overlooked, as it’s not really part of the overall narrative, but appears to stand on its own in the third segment, yet it has major ramifications.  Witek is told “They’ve been practicing for at least ten years…Seems no one in the world can juggle like that.”  What they represent is a vision of excellence bordering on perfection, an example of what people can achieve if they truly dedicate themselves, representing a supreme form of inner freedom.  Regardless of the political stratum, these two are unaffected, seemingly capable of juggling like that forever, as they are masters of their craft, where nothing breaks their concentration.  This may be a moment of enlightenment for Witek, perhaps envisioning himself as the best doctor he can become in his profession, where the pursuit of excellence is its own just reward.  In the second segment, Witek makes a religious transformation and asks to be baptized, yet still questions the existence of God.  This is arguably the most intensely religious sequence in the entire Kieślowski repertoire, as he breaks out into prayer afterwards, but asks only for God to “be there.”  While God may not have shown up yet in his life, this prayer sequence insures that there’s a place waiting for him in the future and he’s warning God to prepare for being present in that moment.  Even if only an abstract metaphysical notion, even if non-existent, God still plays a central role in our lives.  It’s an extraordinary inner awareness that emerges into the heart of the film, which is an inner dialogue we have with ourselves and those higher powers of our own choosing.  It serves as the Bressonian moment of transcendence, a cinematic connection to Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), one of the most unique of religious expressions.  While not as polished and as ravishingly beautiful as his later works, this gritty effort is remarkably complex and powerful, showing rare insight into a moment in history while setting the tone for the films that would follow, providing the emotional and dramatic genesis of his career.   

2020 Top Ten List #1 Martin Eden

Director Pietro Marcello

Actor Luca Marinelli (left) with the director

MARTIN EDEN                    A                                                                                                     Italy  France  Germany  (129 mi)  2019  d:  Pietro Marcello

My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.                                                                              —Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli)

A curiously intriguing yet shattering portrait of an artist as a young man, told with blistering honesty, a model for American writers to come, co-written by the director and Maurizio Braucci, adapting to Italy and Europe an American work by Jack London, an avid socialist, written at the age of 33 after he already achieved international acclaim for his earlier novels The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and White Fang.  Despite the acclaim, London quickly became disillusioned with his popular fame and set sail through the South Pacific on a grueling two-year voyage, struggling with weariness and fatigue generated by gastrointestinal diseases, where he wrote Martin Eden, published in 1909, listed at #61 among Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, filled with open frustrations, adolescent fisticuffs, and struggles for artistic recognition.  Teeming with the bombastic elements of Fellini and Bellocchio, this coming-of-age saga recounts the turn of the century historical period of Italy, shot on Super 16mm by Alessandro Abate and Francesco Di Giacomo, resembling earlier works like Bellocchio’s VINCERE (2010), a portrait of Mussolini as a young man who transitioned from a socialist agitator to a ruthless fascist dictator, or Bertolucci’s early works like Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (1964) and The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), epic historical works, character studies that are also meditations on Italian political history that express the turbulence of the times and are among the best films ever made.  Starring Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden, a semi-autobiographical character who is in nearly every shot of the film, he was awarded Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, but it’s the poignant artistic flourishes that capture the viewer’s imagination, among the few films seen all year that aspire to greatness.  Eden is a carefree sailor coming from an impoverished working class background with no attachments, no beliefs, and no values, leading a purposeless existence, finding himself alone, yet vested with a strong sense of adventure.  A random event changes his life, as he rescues a man at the docks from being harangued and bullied, saving him from some dire fate.  In appreciation, the grateful man introduces Martin to his family, a well-to-do and respectable bourgeois family where he meets his sister, the elegantly refined Jessica Cressy as Elena Orsini, a university student who captures his heart straightaway by playing a wondrous piano recital of Debussy, playing Passepied from his Suite Bergamasque, Debussy: Suite Bergamasque - IV. Passepied (Gieseking ... YouTube (3:42).  Martin immediately becomes receptive to everything associated with her, impassioned with the idea of learning, filled with a flood of visual associations, where she represents a new compelling sensation, like a divine goddess or a spirit of creation, literally breathing in her goodness, possessed by a beauty emanating from her soul, trying to capture her in words, offering a poem, signaling a desire to become a writer, asserting his own self-improvement through books, literally devouring whatever he can find, embarking on a career as a writer, hoping to sell stories to magazines, even turning to her for educational advice, having dropped out of primary school to hit the road and travel, losing what he now values the most, becoming obsessed with learning and broadening his educational background, bettering himself with the inflamed desire to capture her love, continually writing to her during their absence.  From her family’s position, he’s a bit crude and even a little barbaric, never learning bourgeois manner and etiquette, viewed a bit like a bull in a china shop, where his impoverished roots are too raw and coarse for her delicate disposition.  Nonetheless, she’s drawn to him and gives him a chance, but after reading Nietzsche, denying man’s free will, or the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” he spars with the local socialist radicals in free speech forums, arguing against it, conveying individualism as the essential core ingredient, which they angrily associate with their fascist bosses and the ruling class.  Martin transforms his identity, growing as an artist, finding himself increasingly distanced from his working-class background and surroundings, yet is never welcomed into a world of wealth and refinement, which would be essential if he wished to marry Elena, as she’s simply out of his league, becoming a bit of a blowhard out of frustration, overstaying his welcome in her family, railing against her own wealthy parents and their liberal respectability, which only drives her further away.  Her loss is like a hole in his gut, simply irreplaceable, having to build a new life and start anew. 

Martin strives to elevate himself from his destitute circumstances, hoping to achieve a place in the literary establishment, but instead only accumulates a steady stream of rejection letters, renting a room from a widowed seamstress Maria (Carmen Pommella) and her children on the outskirts of town, who takes him in like her own son and encourages him, but grows increasingly angry and suspicious when he’s unable to pay, wondering if he’s taking life seriously.  Early on, before having met Elena, Martin had a one-night fling with Margherita (Denise Sardisco), who he meets again in Elena’s company working as a waitress, ignoring her, paying her no mind, but he runs after her again after being shunned by the Orsini family, becoming the new love of his life.  But Martin exhibits chauvinist manners, never treating women with equal respect, believing contemptuously they are somehow beneath him, as if women are a lower standing than men, which is how women were perceived a century ago, and Martin, more of a roughneck, was not ahead of his times when it comes to gallantry or appreciation.  Instead he develops an unlikely friendship with an older man, Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), a cynical loner who is a committed socialist, also a sickly writer suffering from tuberculosis who encourages him to give up writing and return to the sea before he gets swallowed up by the corrupt stench of city life, introducing him to some real socialist firebrands that he calls the “real dirt,” as they’re willing to get their hands dirty in pursuit of a more equitable political solution, yet Eden ardently rejects the socialists, or even joining a union, which to him means giving up one boss for another, calling them part of a slave class that has always existed in history, identifying instead with hard corps individualism, but only for himself, like some kind of frontier freedom, never speaking for a human collective or a surrounding impoverished class that needs to liberate itself from tyranny.  Brissenden becomes his holy mentor, an incomparable artist, a man alone in the Cosmos, a madman scoffing at the world, showing absolute contempt for his audience, cut off from all superficial connections and values, writing Ephemera, which Martin calls a poem of the century, just before he shoots himself (foreshadowing Martin’s own fate).  This kind of Socratic dialogue plays out like a Greek theater commenting on Italian history, which was undergoing massive transformations, mirroring his own metamorphosis as an unrecognized yet free-spirited writer.  When one of his stories finally gets published, the monetary reward is stunning, finally able to contribute something back to the hands that have been feeding him.  An indictment of pandering art and a brilliant essay calling for a more challenging and thoughtful expression of filmmaking, Marcello’s film is intensely creative and vividly experimental, using astounding visual imagery, where the cleverness is setting an additional underlying layer happening simultaneously as the story is being told, filled with dreamlike effects which may or may not be capturing his imagination at the time, but sets a tone for what may be a poem of the mind, much like the works of Terrence Malick.  Revealing a subterranean stream-of-conscious layer that’s given such a prominent place in the overall artistic design of the film, filled with realistic faces of working place figures, hardened by time and lifelong effort, or grainy, color-tinted archival footage, yet also juxtaposed by the innocence of dancing children, who may represent Martin and his sister at a young age, which is another expression of pure love that also changes over time, as well as the presence of ships at sea, which in a particularly dire moment slowly sinks.  This impressionistic revelation of his interior thoughts, given a swooning backdrop of history, may be the most astounding aspect of the film, visually the most stunning and surprising, with remarkable editing, where early on what sounds like French popular songs play out over some of these sequences, exuding the energy of the French New Wave, which can be jarring, feeling sentimentalized and distorted, but also represents daring choices, as youth is filled with a kaleidoscope of shifting influences, not all of which stick with you or hold the same meaning, but they were all part of your life, where the meaning that matters the most changes over time. 

The film jumps ahead in years, with Martin now a popular and commercial success, where people who were suspicious of him initially have now come to accept him, where his views are part of the mainstream, even beloved internationally, with his working-class depictions of communal struggle endearing him to Communist countries like Russia and China, yet Martin has also changed substantially, exuding traits of unending despair and fatalism that are a walking contradiction, no longer the rebel rouser of his youth, yet he commands attention in public forums, where he is treated like a celebrity.  But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying his success, or care to be a generational influence, remaining distrustful of anyone close to him, believing it’s not him but his fame they value, basically ordering Margherita around as if she’s his own personal slave, treating Elena with utter contempt when she comes around to pay a visit, where he seems angry at the world, as if there is no safe space.  While the world has moved on and embraced him, he remains ambivalent, offering a bleakly honest assessment of himself, still seeing himself as an outsider railing against the cowardice of bourgeois society, donating much of his money to the socialist causes simply because they remain irritants to the status quo, wanting wholesale changes to the world around them, as poverty continues growing unabated, with wealthy classes ignoring them with a sustained indifference, which is where Martin now finds himself, older, less ambitious, more resigned to his sad fate.  Wealthy and successful, but unhappy in love, he cherishes his memories when he was committed to searching for freedom, seeking a primary truth, when he was a young firebrand knocking on the door of success, persistent in following his dreams.  But where has it gotten him?  Embittered by his own view of individualism, which failed to provide the desired promise, as the person in the story is not a hero, still holding a grudge against all those who didn’t accept him early on, including the publishers, the same bourgeois interests that now embrace him, even Elena, holding them at the center of his unbridled contempt.  The hubris of his own ego, his own hypocrisy, looms large, as he’s become a hollow caricature of himself, no longer real, but a figment in people’s imagination who see in him what they want, not who he really is.  This elusive idea of individualism seems unattainable, yet it’s been the driving force of his life, transforming a remarkable success story into a chronicle of human failure, unable to stop the rising tide of fascism, which is all but inevitable in the annals of history.  Few even understand or care anymore, as they don’t really take him seriously.  As for himself, he seems to be following the disgruntled path of his old friend Russ Brissenden, forever wanting something better, giving more than lip service to it, including large sums of money, but he’s like a prisoner of his own beliefs, unable to bring about social change or live in an unjust world, resigned to a certain fate that he’s no longer a fighting force.  He has offers and designs of traveling to America, writing about the New World, which just might shake up his complacency, becoming his latest project, or is it just a vanity project?  These kinds of thoughts are swirling around in his head, never the success he dreamed of, as he hates being a public figure, loathing and hating himself for becoming part of what he in fact detests and resents.  A forlorn figure besieged by doubts, like CITIZEN KANE (1941), the sum total of his life stands before him, where it’s so easy to condemn what he’s become.  Defying God and nature in the same breath, he can only in the end rail against himself and his own failed practices, as he couldn’t attain the success he wanted, on his own terms, in his own mind, which was to be a free man.  Bought and sold to the highest bidder, his value determined by commerce, in his mind he’s a total disgrace, a complete fraud, and a moral hypocrite.  With one last individualist gesture, a desperate attempt to assert a mangled and perverted inclination of free will, the New World will have to wait, as instead he flings himself into the sea with a bitter sense of nihilist futility, followed by a somber and impassioned musical transcendence, Ottorino Respighi: Tre Corali di Johann Sebastian Bach (P. 167) YouTube (11:57).  In many ways London’s life mirrors Jack Kerouac, a poet who took his talents on the road seeking the elusive road to freedom, living his youth to the fullest, never stopping for a moment to breathe, always on the move, yet once he becomes a successful celebrity writer, his response is to drown himself in liquor and self-loathing.  Even the name Eden conjures up imagery of a Paradise Lost.  Exuding the raging existentialist ramblings of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, London described his novel as a searing critique of the failures of individualism, and a parable of a man who had to die, “Not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men.”