Ink | Pen | Paper

Today, I woke up during that period of time considered to be the “ungodly hours of predawn.” Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep. Thus, I decided to watch one of the movies I downloaded off the web last week. This movie, I believe, is a critically-acclaimed film, that tells the story of a young girl who lived in Germany during the Second World War.

I found the plot of the film to be slightly similar to that of yet another film set in postwar Germany, called “The Reader.” However, while watching the film, I couldn’t help but realize that, I was drawn more to the girl than the storyline. I don’t know who this young actress is, but she had large, mesmerizing eyes, puffy lips, and long, curly locks. I guess if I were a movie critic, I would say she was probably too pretty for the role of the protagonist, Liesl. However, I think choosing her for the role was right in the fact that she had the power to draw my attention in each and every scene where she appeared. But this fixation I had for the girl, pulled and somehow insulated me from the larger perspective that the story had to offer. The story is actually told from the point of view of an entity which can only be described as an embodiment of death, although it wasn’t really represented as a visible, tangible being, only a disembodied voice. It somehow struck me, that this entity wasn’t exactly death, but something more encompassing and timeless, and I realized what it was—it was actually the universe.

If the universe could somehow address humans directly, I guess it would talk in the same manner as how “death” narrated certain events that transpired in the movie. For the nature of the universe is not unlike that of death—it is a point of beginning, of birth. Furthermore, it is encompassing, and ultimately, an eventuality.

I guess longing to be one with the universe is quite similar to a longing for the state of death. We do not consider the universe to be alive, thus it is only naturally to associate it with death. It is a non-living entity. The great irony lies in the fact, that, it takes a living, sentient entity, like us humans, to actually come up with a means to describe the death that we all occupy and inhabit.

It has been said, and usually, more eloquently, by writers a lot more verbose and descriptive than myself, throughout the ages, that sleep is something like that of a temporary death. We slip into that dark fabric of unconsciousness, and time practically stops for us in the state of sleep, while the rest of the living world continues the clockwork that it constructed for itself, as a means for it to continue its cyclic existence.