“The enemy is anyone who questions liberalism, globalism, individualism, nominalism in all their manifestations. This is the new ethic of liberalism. It’s nothing personal. Everyone has the right to be liberal, but no one has the right to be anything else.”
Drive: A love story /
Drive (2011) directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. The frames are taken from Driver and Irene’s courtship, which is by far my favourite part of the movie (before the violence begins). The dialog is spare and the love between the characters unfolds slowly and powerfully in a sequence of simple scenes rendered by achingly beautiful cinematography set against a perfect electronic score. The exquisite innocence of the romance blossoms amidst the dread of upcoming calamity.
What you should have resisted at the time /
“You may be tempted to take stock, to wrestle with the past. There is nothing wrong with that. But do not make a further mistake, the mistake of stepping back, abstracting from the details of your life, to ask what you should want. In abstracting, you discard a vital source of rational affirmation: not the bare existence of activities, artifacts, relationships, but their impossibly verdant depths. Do not weigh alternatives theoretically, but zoom in: let the specifics count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived. In doing so, you may find you cannot regret what you should have resisted at the time.”
Under the justification of a possessive individualism /
“The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death.”
The gossip that "feeds on sporadic and superficial reading" /
“The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn up from primordial sources with a struggle, and how much is just gossip. Moreover, the average understanding will not even want such a distinction, will not have need of it, since, after all, it understands everything.”