"Lolita," I said, "this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after."
"People should mate forever, like pigeons... or like Catholics......"
The first quote is my favourite passage from one of my favourite books, Nabokov's Lolita. Despite the nature of the story, to me, a hopeless sentimentalist, this is still one of the saddest love declarations I'd ever read - in one moment, monstrosity turns to sacrifice, outrage to heartbreaking tenderness, iniquity to a deep and self-destructive love.
The second quote is from Woody Allen's Manhattan, and it kept running through my mind as I (finally!) watched "That Penguin Movie", which opened in the UK two days ago (which, like everything else in this country, is just abominable: I mean, for chrissakes, it was being shown on Singapore Airlines when I went home in September (though I resisted then as I wanted to catch it on the big screen) - now if your theatre release can't beat the scheduling of an airline's inflight entertainment, that is very, very sad.)
Anyway. The film was charming, though I thought its storytelling could have been a lot tighter, considering it was a rather straightforward narrative. (Aside: Now, for a *superb* animal-documentary narrative, take my word for it, right here right now, that nothing can beat "Meerkat Manor" (shown in thirteen episodes on Animal Planet) - I would love to talk more about it, but for now... believe me, it is completely without peer.) What I felt was most interesting, though, about Penguins is the amount of anthropomorphism that one (sub)consciously processes in order to make this film work: the romance of mate-finding, the sacrifices for the eggs, the parental love of the chicks, the rearing, nursing, caring, nurturing, cherishing, tending etc etc. All very touching, and everybody duly coos and ahs. Yet, really - come on. The penguins are doing no more than obeying a deep natural instinct - of breeding and propagation and ensuring the continuation of the species. It is not a moral choice - of heroics or self-sacrifice - they never had one.
But doesn't "over-attribution" apply to alot of things in life? I cannot count the number of times I have stood at the bottom of the train station, telling myself, "from here to the platform there are twenty, twenty-five steps. Climb those steps now......" At the end of the day, the story is no more than simply the recognition that it is not an issue for election, that inherent in love is duty, that the sins and infirmities of one generation really do flow in the blood of the next. And that it is not a moral choice - that in life perhaps one really has very, very little of it, or none at all.
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