I'm a failure of a reader. I can't locate the meaning of the movies theme in In the Beauty of the Lilies. I know it connects to the illusion of meaning it creates in the wake of the realization of God's non-existence, but that is obviously not much of a profound mechanism to drive the novel forward. Maybe it's my problem with being unable to identify narratives that don't follow my favored narratives (the revolution, Buddhist enlightenment, etc), or maybe it's my continuing lack of sympathy for Clarences revelation that God doesn't exist.

Updike makes the loss of God an irreparable one, and I just kept feeling that Clarence should get over it and embrace some sort of humanism, but then he didn't and it killed him. Despite the book being relatively recent (1996), the central discussion about the loss of God seems somewhat antiquated, something we got over after some soul searching between the wars and then fully released with the myriad of new thought and spirituality post-war.

A reverberation of the book I've been feeling the most is the fleetingness of life and the different non-omniscient perspectives each person holds. The whole point of ethics (for me) is to figure out what is universally the moral course of action, if there are different perspectives on the world to do if someone always thinks something else is the moral action! There is something primal in my brain that cannot separate the pursuit of a universalizable ethics and doing the right thing in the eyes of my community.

It appeals to me very much that ethics is fundamentally constructed, but how then can ethics be universal? How does relativism not seep in, and how can I not be the imperialist when I tell Iranians they're treatment of women is objectively wrong?

In the meantime when I act against the better sense of my peers and elders I justify it by thinking I have extrapolated on the same 'common sense' assumptions they base their morality. Maybe there is a fundamental agreement on the basis of morality (if morality is constructed), that we just need to find the best way to get along as a imperfect, sometimes empathetic/cooperative and sometimes selfish, subjects that are radically reliant on each other for our survival and happiness.

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The consumerisation of ideology is embodied by this quote.

The post-modern is a bizarre place to live; where the adoption of ideologies like Christianity or new age religion or anarchism/leftism (etc etc etc) is an extension of the impulse to consume.

Maybe this just proves that consumerisation just illuminates our preexisting relationship with physical and mental objects to mystify our essential existential qualms. To be fair, ideological objects where what we were rich in before industrialisation, so the modern consumer relationship to objects can be related to the european consumption of the ideology of Christianity before the modern period.

Death is not at all like sleep. Sleep is stories told, forms moving, destruction, and stories retold. The very stuff of life is in sleep; the vital and potent consciousness wrangling internally with an external world that is deaf and blind and scentless and touchless, without that which is external, or radically internal, to it, and thinking of it.

By day we encounter death. In the clasp of mortal hand to mortal hand. The woken under everlasting night and day and night. An unfolding story, with a countless cast, played eternal, and without author.

Awake and dream in the day. Dream hot and cold. Dream satiated and starved. Dream good and bad. Dream nations and wars and freedom and fiery revolution.

Dream of the author or not.

We are asleep in the day, triumph and defeat are images created of our large imaginations that fade in light, and desperate not to wake and cease the endless story.