Sunday, July 20

I wrote what I thought was a clever letter to a classmate of mine once, and she dismissed my "gloomy riddles". Now I feel a lot of Bergman is gloomy riddles, but I liked Through a Glass Darkly (1962), even though my wife lost patience with it. A couple of things I'd like to remember. The schizophrenic's distant father tells her, "We draw a magic circle and shut out everything that doesn't agree with our secret games. Each time life breaks the circle, the games turn grey and ridiculous. Then we draw a new circle and build a new defense." Also the grim humor of the fact that it's the schizophrenic who sees God, who turns out to be a spider with "terrible, stony face". Ha-ha. But the ending after that was less appealing for those of us who find the idea of a God unbelievable--or unendurable.

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