As such the world is ravaged in war . . . so make love – at least it keeps you healthy and happy, and the world less tense.
MEISSEN VESSEL WITH MUSIC MAKING ELF
VESSEL WITH MUSIC-MAKING ELF
MEISSEN
Limited Masterworks 2019
There are two kinds of people - the nouveau riche (new rich/new money), and the wealthy (familial inheritance). The nouveau riche acquires new automobiles and disgracefully ostentatious wristwatches and feels ecstatic that they have reached somewhere by carrying around monogrammed luggage firmly clutched between their fingers. The ones with familial inheritance find themselves most effortlessly drawn towards the art, antiques, knowledge, meaning; anything that was a part of history and that tells a story. Automobiles for them are simply a means of conveyance, wristwatches merely to tell the time, and luggage to keep their daily paraphernalia secure.
In a common man’s language: watches, cars and flashy luggage anyone who has a little money can buy, but what truly discerns you from the herd is taste, and taste is not superficial, and it is something that is seldom obtained by amassing money – it is an assured sign of the thoroughbred.
Yes, for the marginal, who manage to attain the money and also the taste, – welcome to the club of an evolved existence – and, for those who are yet infatuated with their wristwatches, automobiles and luggage; hope sense prevails on you, and in time you mature enough to realise that materialism only attracts the materialistic. And for those on whom the sense fails to prevail, well, then, enjoy your life the manner in which you deem it fit, for maybe, that was how you were exactly meant to be: ersatz and frothy.
Yes, for the marginal, who manage to attain the money and also the taste, – welcome to the club of an evolved existence – and, for those who are yet infatuated with their wristwatches, automobiles and luggage; hope sense prevails on you, and in time you mature enough to realise that materialism only attracts the materialistic. And for those on whom the sense fails to prevail, well, then, enjoy your life the manner in which you deem it fit, for maybe, that was how you were exactly meant to be: ersatz and frothy.
KAL AAJ KAL
Aaj ka mahaul aisa hai ke
baatein kuch ankahee si.
Lekin ek baat jayaz hai –
mussalman ka ek hi sthan,
Pakistan ya kabristan
Inke beech thode hi to hain
mere apne huzoor.
Unke ke liye jaan haazir hai
passport ya biryani toh
duniya ke samaan hain…
Arsaa guzar gaya yeh
sochte sochte
ki
khoon toh ek hi hai na Mohsin,
phir yeh lakeeren kisne kheenche.
HAPPY - 2015
The Oxford English Dictionary describes HAPPY as an
adjective denoting a feeling of pleasure or contentment.
Jacques Attali in We, Europeans, Are Alone, said, since the twenties, Europeans gradually became
accustomed to the idea that, even if they made a thousand mistakes, there would
always be someone to save them from their own turpitude. And the United States
also gradually settled into the role of Deus ex Machina. And indeed, they saved
us (with Stalin) from Nazi monsters with their army; they saved us from our
economic sclerosis with the Marshall Plan; and they saved us from the Soviet
threat with their nuclear missiles. He further elaborated, this support has always been carefully
managed and limited: the Americans had done everything so that their Allies
could continue needing them. It was out of the question for the Europeans to be
independent militarily, financially, culturally, industrially or
technologically. There was not a single strategic industry in which the United
States did not seek to either maintain control, or deprive the Europeans from
doing so. Similarly, there was not an area of law where the Americans did not
try to set the rules. And there was not an area in innovation where the
Americans were not pulling the strings. Today,
everything has changed. Europeans can no longer afford to not see that they are
alone; that the Americans are no longer there to defend them; that the American
President makes his decisions without taking into account either the point of
view or the interests of their allies.
You might as well wonder what I am trying to arrive
at by drawing a corollary to something as commonplace as politics when the
composition of this piece was meant to be on film. What people hardly ever
understand is that a great deal of film has to do with what is around us – it
is a medium that rather mirrors existence. While America did manage to militarily,
financially, culturally, industrially or technologically control the Europeans,
one thing it failed to control was their art and cinema, more so due to the tenacious
temperament of the creative people not succumbing to any sort of external coercion,
and this is what HAPPY, written, produced, and
directed by Jordan Goldnadel is fundamentally about.
Jordan plays the protagonist
Florent, 23, an upper class Parisian. He is intelligent, kind, and dressed with a
philosophical smile. He meets Alessia (Isabelle
Ryan), 23, a continually fuming, strangely sophisticated and nonsensically
naïve lost American photographer in Paris. Bored in a
society that praises the failures of men and women who give each other what
they ‘need’ and not what they ‘want’ with the result that love becomes
infected, Florent feels fossilised in Paris, and dreams of America. Alessia, on
the other hand is trying to separate herself from her typical origins, far from
the artistic and adventurous life she intends to lead, and dreams of achieving
it in France. As luck would have it, Florent and Alessia meet at a park, where
Alessia begins to take photographs of Florent without his consent. Amused at
her brazenness, he asks her if she isn’t aware of image rights, and instead of
finding herself engulfed in a pail of shame, she grins and asks him by virtue
of gestures to move his face a little to a side in order for her to take more
pictures of him.
Life is small, I had read somewhere, and our routines are rote and nearly
imperceptible. Often, in writing classrooms, we’re told that it’s this
smallness that makes a piece of literature. It said that most of our lives are basically mundane
and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting (that’s Updike). Or, Life is not plot;
it’s in the details (that’s
Jodi Picoult). Usually, though, this sentiment ends up seeming as hollow and
insincere as: write what you know because we do cherish plot, we do fetishize the arc, the action, and the
twist, in nonfiction, we also fetishize the about-ness. We openly question if the reality of a
writer’s subject is worth discussing. We prioritize a weighty topic over the
force of an author’s gaze, the clarity of prose, the sincerity of emotion.
Underneath it all runs that same droning question: Who cares? Who cares? Who
cares? Virginia
Woolf really cared about that poor moth, and Didion really cared about her
notebook, and Montaigne really cared about, well, everything. That
is Jordan as a writer to me – inventive, and not some celebrity who lands up on
a talk show and narrates a story about their kids as though no other child has
ever existed. Admire how he cares about the close
ups of objects – of the food, of expressions, of the waiter cleaning the table
at the café, the book lying on the table. Every little element has something
that is stunning in Happy because movies merely like to concentrate on the
extravagant. They like to light up every frame like people are dressed up to go
to a party. And anyone who has lived well enough to understand life understands
that we are not always our best all the time, and life is certainly not a
party, (despite us wanting to present to the world that we each live in this
gorgeous, near perfect life in a predominantly ‘social media’ driven world). On
a larger stance the attentiveness to such detail was a befitting symbol of
stopping awhile and taking note of things that we generally tend to overlook
whilst going about the drudgery of day-to-day survival. The further
attention to art and artefacts, the artistry of the etching on the whiskey
glasses, the scarlet Cartier lighter, each of them that are brought into
cinematic focus are there to tell us a story within a story. Florent disrobing
the shrimp at the restaurant as Alessia begins to speak is a strapping allegory
that leads to the robust manner in which her feelings are denoted in the setting.
The fascinating part: where she utters ‘and’, pauses, and then utters another
‘and’, and concludes it with, “Oh, my mother just died.” reminded me of The
Outsider by Albert Camus. Although the scene sports an easy demeanour, it is not
easy in the least. I urge you to read Camus in order to appreciate why I say
this about the writing of Jordan.
The creative canvas
that Jordan Goldnadel draws up for Florent and Alessia who are shown at a crucial crossroad of their lives, very anchored in their
generation, and are yet torn is an thought-provoking curve of human psychology.
They ask – Who am I? What will I do with my life? Where will I live? Does the
right person exist? Do I want what’s expected of me? Such questions do tend to
assault us at various stages of our life. “What’s the use of falling in love
if
you both remain inertly as-you-
were?” Mary McCarthy asked her
friend
Hannah Arendt
in their correspondence about love. A derivative of the same
question is what Jordan undertakes to answer in Happy. These queries resonate
the current state of the mind, because love, as someone once said,
speaks to a
central necessity of
our life — at its truest and most
potent, love invariably
does
change us by de-conditioning our
painful pathologies and elevating
us toward
our highest human
potential. Love tells us that in the
romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of
love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme so
as to render love fragile, and when lovers are expected to fuse together so
closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralysing co-dependency — a
calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth.
In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists
with the integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and
fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in
his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other
possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp?
Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”
The irony of modern life is that love stories have become horror
stories and horror stories, love stories. Like the ageing Hollywood crowd,
films are thin and flabby, in bad taste, ostentatious, vulgar. Either they are
inadequately overdressed or expensively undressed. There was once a time when
in Hollywood the houses began to become as plush as hotels, and yet the people
who lived in these houses began to make hotels their residences. That is quite
the difference between the American and European cinema, its experience. This
is the point where one can almost hear the words of Mary Oliver echo – “All of it, the differences and the maverick
uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself,
what shall I learn of you, or you of me?”
In recent years, largely due to the uncertainty of the producers about
what will draw the audience based more so on the fickleness of the audience,
films at the very stage of scripting may shift several perspectives and may be
finally cut into a product that is not appealing to the people who come to
enjoy a film. This is where Happy was sombre and stylish. It was quite a
rhythmical vision. The characters were developed without any highbrow
pretentions. You got what you saw, and what you saw was quite the slice of an
impersonal and abstract atmosphere, mixed with frankness about a film that took
itself seriously.
Also, we live in times where the younger audience does not react to
love on the screen. They are eternally distracted and talking amidst
themselves, until of course ghastly images of blood and gore make them shut up
and take notice. Why don’t they react to love one may ask? They don’t perhaps
react to love because they are not used to the idea of love, they are married
to their gadgets, they find a dopamine high in bursts of likes and shares on
social media, and they are depressed when nobody reacts to their posts or their
shares, and as an extension of such vacuous lifestyle choices the very idea of
having to be in a real flesh and blood relationship makes them squirm with
fright. What about the older audience then one may ask? The older audience on
the other hand care less for the storyline. They go to the movies merely to
watch the sex. So what happens to the rest – the intellectuals? Unfortunately,
they are left with nothing, unless of course people like Jordan Goldnadel shape
scripts like Happy that are packed with a profound sense of contemplation.
Television, and the internet, with all its breaks and cuts, and the
inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find some conflict, is
partly responsible for the destruction of the narrative sense – that delight in
following a story through its complications to its conclusion, which is perhaps
a child’s first conscious artistic pleasure. The old staples of entertainment –
inoffensive genres like the adventure story, or the musical, or the ghost story,
or the detective story are no longer commercially safe for moviemakers, and it
may be that audiences don’t have much more than a TV span of attention left:
they want to be turned on and they spend most of their time turning off. Something
similar and related may be happening in reading tastes and habits too: teens
have often read Salinger and some Orwell, Joyce maybe, and sometimes even
Dostoyevsky, but they are not interested in the ‘classic’ English novels of
Scott or Dickens, and what is more to the point, they don’t read the Sherlock
Holmes stories or even the modern detective fiction that in the thirties and
forties was an accepted part of the shared experience of adolescents. Perhaps
they want much more from entertainment than the civilised, but limited rational
pleasures of the genre pieces. And more likely, the box-office returns support
this; they want something different. Audiences that enjoy shocks and
falsifications, the brutal series of titillations, they want one thrill after
another, don’t care any longer about the convections of the past, and are too
restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause
and effect. They want less effort, more sensations, and more knobs to turn.
Sexuality is depicted in various films with an innate
rationale, or imposed upon by time-tested, accepted ideologies. Happy is the
only film where I found that the people who made love to each other did so without
attempting to intellectualise it. As adults what we do with each other,
regardless of the societal clichés or labels, is entirely up to us, and we are
not obliged to offer anybody an explanation for it. Culture has mortared
certain stubbornly trifling guidelines on us, and it judges us by those barren strictures,
and this is where we must break that die and be undaunted by the world’s assessment
of our actions. We must do exactly as our heart desires, because desires aren’t
lead by intellect but by instinct, and instinct isn’t erroneous.
Actor and director Vladimir Perrin as Thomas is strong and opinionated. He can take to different ideas but is intolerable to assumed stupidity that branches from half-baked wisdom rather than from learning or experiences in Happy. Léa Moszkowicz as Marion is impressive as a friend. A Marion is needed, most urgently, in people’s lives, a life that is seeing the line blur between what friendship is, and how friendship ought to be. The camerawork of Jean Sotelo is appropriate for the tone of the movie. The music by Izzy Gaon is effective. The soundtrack includes some great Amanda Palmer songs and the surprise of surprises is the lilting number Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga by Rahul Dev Burman from our very own Indian film 1942: A Love Story.
When the final credits begin to roll, Happy leaves
you with a
feeling of pleasure and contentment, and one recollects Leo Tolstoy who said, if
you want to be happy, be.
FOREVER MY GIRL – 2018
“Only the gentle are ever really strong.”
~ James Dean ~
I had posted the trailer of Forever My Girl on my
Twitter, Instagram and Facebook long before anyone else had posted anything
about it because I had read the book by Heidi McLaughlin and I was
awaiting the big screen version with utmost impatience simply because I was
craving to see if the book was better or the movie.
I watched it last night, and I must add, with
much emphasis, that the movie moved me deeply. In a time where everybody seems
to take love for granted and seldom works on it like a sculptor works most
lovingly on his marble by giving it the shape and form he so desires, Forever
My Girl had several things going for it: innate heartache, binds and
bonds of family and friends, feelings and emotions most handsomely handled and expressed,
a fine representation of how some relationships stand the test of time and some
don’t – it even had god and the church, and despite the critics seeming to have
made little of it, I was enormously pleased that it was rather treasured by the
public with much enthusiasm, and why not? It contained no violence, no lovemaking,
or even profanity for that matter, something we see most meaninglessly woven
into the tapestry of a film merely to tempt and titillate the audiences. The
movie made you feel that you don’t need to be bohemian to be acceptably
fashionable. That there is great meaning in simplicity, and sophisticated
simplicity is something that is part of our cultural DNA, and at the end of the
day manners, respect and love score over everything else. Adored how nobody
is scheming and insulting anybody, and how, with such refined balance, each one
is actually responsible for each other’s keeping.
Cinema, the arts,
literature or anything to do with humanities does have a rather calming effect
on mankind. Watching a violent film, leaves behind a distasteful residue in us.
I was reading an article by Jacques Attali called Can Art Do Anything Against Violence? In that he states, and I
quote – art softens proprieties. In principle, art represents
civilization, beauty, serenity and benevolence. Moreover, in principle, nothing
is more soothing than frequenting masterpieces of art. He explains further that societies that reject art are particularly violent. I have
always supported this view that if we surround ourselves with negativity or
viciousness, it percolates into our system, reaching soon a point of no return,
and it is at such times that we need to use mediums like literature, art and
film to tell folks whelmed in such throes that life is not something to be
spent nurturing the unsavoury. That if you see and surround yourself with the
good, there is every chance that the good would manifest itself in your heart
and soul and make you a person who will be an epitome of buoyancy. Perhaps I
make it sound as easy as picking up a glass of water and gulping it down one’s
throat, and for many, I daresay, it is indeed easy to go with the flow, however,
those who thrive on independence of thought and above all possess a strong character,
would not find themselves beguiled by the trends of the times. They would
reject that which they feel is detrimental to their inner and outward growth. As
the events unfolded on the screen, it was like watching a charming wedge from
the golden age of cinema. I found myself so very absorbed in every scene merely
because it brought to itself a novelty one was not accustomed to watching these
days. It had such a lovely touch of affection between Liam and Joise, and the
very representation of that type of pure love has been absent for a long time,
not only on the screen, but also in the lives of people as well. And that is
when I wondered why other filmmakers were not making more movies like these
when they knew what effect the cinema has on people? That is when I discerned
that this was not the problem of the filmmakers per se, but an enigma of the
most mammoth kind with the current generation itself – a generation that thrived
on instant gratification, and who’s attention span was colossally distrait, for
when they saw something that lacked unreal twists and turns in
storytelling, a screenplay that grew organically with the story, they were seldom
able to differentiate a pebble from a diamond.
I LEARNT / LIKED
That people seldom change until something life
changing comes along to change them. Liam has everything, and yet what he
yearns for is some ‘real’ love from the ‘real’ people he craves it from.
That children can be smarter than we think they are. In
fact they are far too smart for their age when we were their age. It is like
they come fitted with an innate antenna in them that works beyond our capacity
to understand their mechanics.
That people tend to hide a lot, not to escape their
pain, but because they don’t know how to articulate what they are hiding. This
is where every Liam needs a Josie. And when I say that, I do not mean only in
form of the opposite sex, the aim is that every Liam in us needs someone like
Josie to believe in them; to understand that we need to be there for those whom
we love most unconditionally when we know that our souls have connected. This
is where we have to go back to our life’s drawing boards and rub the parts away
where we are each raised with the belief that nobody is indispensable. Such
teachings are nothing but a bunch of garbage as there is absolutely no substitute
for those who matter to us. Also, how the scar of his childhood would have left
Liam so gravely damaged that in being unable to process the pain, he finds
himself abandoning what requires mending. This is where we have to understand
that people deal with grief in ways that we may not understand. We have to be
patient and let the hurt heal. We have to be the anchor and help one another
get through the distress regardless of the hardships we face.
How not everything can be made right by money, just
as gifts mean nothing in the lives of those who mean the world to us.
How the old duct-taped phone that Liam holds closest
to his heart indicates that in life we may become larger than life for the world
and have everything we would ever want, but it is these little things that
matter: things that we attach importance to by virtue of them being woven into
the valves of our heart and soul.
Liam rushing barefoot to the phone store illustrates
most marvellously how, when we are in our plainest elements, we care less for
anything that the world cares for in us. I loved how when he offers ten
thousand dollars to anybody who can fix his phone, the manager of the store
offers to fix it for him on the house. This is where I think that the values
that we see fading at an alarming rate today are awfully imperative to keeping
and preserving the nature of helping our fellow human beings without any
strings attached. I loved how Josie tells Liam that there would be nothing
between them, and exactly an instant after he hears her say that, Liam asks
Josie if he can pick her up from work.
How Liam, who hasn’t been able to produce any
riveting music, or written any heart-touching songs because his life appears
clouded by the distractions of city life, the drugs, and the flesh, is able to
write with much profoundness in an environment that he finds actual comfort in.
Many people who crave for celebrity do not realise that celebrity is
intoxicating, and it can also consume you in ways that you can rarely fathom,
and by the time you realise you want to retract your steps, your feet would
have been far dunked in dirt, unless of course providence is benevolent enough
and gives you a second chance.
DID NOT LIKE
1/ The parallel drawn on Nicholas Spark’s work to market
this movie was lame. Agreed he is a novelist who has made great success by
tapping on the pulse of the passions of love and relationships, but his work is
dreadfully predictable. If not anything it is weighed down with overdoses of
saccharine. The Forever My Girl production house did not have to piggyback on
someone else when their product was strong enough on its own.
2/ Here are
some (inexcusable) excerpts from the book:
On page 87
“No.” I
shake my head to emphasis my point.
It should have been: I shake my head to emphasise my point?
On page 89
I couldn’t
really say no since he used buy our beer for us.
Where is the ‘to’
before buy?
Like all
else, it seems editing too has taken a nosedive. It is appalling that
publishing houses do not take their reputation seriously. Whom are they
catering to with such mistakes? Shouldn’t the publishing firms engage
experienced editors? How did the writer give her nod to the final draft?
CREW
One must tip one’s hat for the director Bethany Ashton
Wolf. She is incredibly in control of her project. Glad she decided
on the novel, and then chiselled it into the magnificent screenplay with the
writer of the novel, Heidi McLaughlin. The book and the film are strikingly
dissimilar. I found the film far more powerful than the book. The book in portions
was unpolished and insensitive. It had many trivial characters, was overloaded
with the unnecessary usage of profanity, and was jarringly predictable. The
movie on the other hand was charming and reflected meaning. It was not merely
cinema that was callous. It was something one can watch with school kids to
grandparents – and each age group will cherish most deeply the beauty of
relationships depicted in it as long as they live.
Right from the etiquettes to the minute details of
human nature that Bethany Ashton Wolf has portrayed in her movie makes her one
of my favourite directors. I adored how she avoids playing to the gallery who
worships effect, and effect, unfortunately, is rather short-lived, because what
stays on even when we are long gone is culture and polish, and she is a master
raconteur of that polite genre.
Alex Roe is a fine choice for Liam Page not only for
his chiselled jawline, lanky structure, expressive eyes, but more so because he
enhances his American twang with the refined touch of British finesse. Jessica
Rothe as Josie is my favourite. She has a winning smile, strong legs, and a
voice to drool over. Convincing and vulnerable, she is as perfect as Josie
could get for the big screen. John Benjamin Hickey as Pastor Brian was another
role enacted with immense panache by John. He has an alluring screen presence
and it is a delight to watch him play his role with utter subtlety. Abby Ryder
Fortson as Billy is the niftiest kid around. She essays her role to the perfect
T – bold, confident, observant and how a kid actually ought to be – genteel, genuine,
and yet having a free soul of her own. Peter Cambor as Sam, Liam’s manager is
more like his sounding board. He is like what a good friend is – looking out
for you and giving you a smack on the arse when you most need it. Gillian
Vigman as Doris, Liam’s publicist enacts her little screen time with verve and ardour.
Tyler Riggs as Jake, Josie’s brother is one of the smartest men in the movie.
He has an easy-going charm to him not without the unmistakable stamp of defined
masculinity that is a hallmark of country life.
The compositions of Brett Boyett sink into your soul.
Alex Roe’s vocals are a treat for the melody-crazy music buffs. Duane Manwiller
has handled the camera with deftness.
ON A BROADER
PERSPECTIVE
When you turn the pages of the newspaper, or scroll
across digital screens, you discern the reasons that are common to the ruining
of relationships are either downright childish or not worthy of a thought. At
such times you wonder whatever can be done to amend the straying attitudes. One
of them is surely to do with COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS. You will be alarmed to learn
that sexual infidelity is not really the problem causer in most couples, but
the lack of communication is. Not thinking he is good enough for Josie, Liam
takes a decision based on his own summation without asking her how she feels
about him, and when his intention is to do her good, he ends up hurting
everybody in the bargain. This behaviour is directly related to an evolutionary
problem – men find it difficult to express their emotions since they have been
conditioned to be manly, and to be manly is not to admit to your vulnerabilities
or come into contact with your innermost feelings. They learn to bottle up
their emotions and sink along with the ship even if there were to be a
lighthouse in the distance.
LACK OF INTIMACY: When I use the word ‘intimacy’ I am
not pointing in the direction of sexual pleasure. Sex is vital in a
relationship, but sex is not the core of everything in life. Men need sexual
receptivity to feel romantic, and women need romance to be sexually receptive.
That has been most beautifully represented in the movie. Liam has his fair
share of women as a celebrity, while Josie finds herself so intertwined with
Laim and his soul even in his absence that she cannot find someone to make love
with for the sake of fulfilling her desires. People forget that intimacy is not
merely genital-to-genital contact, but intimacy can be found in hugs, kisses,
the need to be touched, fondled, and to feel close to their partners. Relationships
can head towards a dead end if we stop paying attention to intimacy.
UNMET EXPECTATIONS: Sometimes small things can create
the widest rifts. Be watchful of what triggers a negative reaction in your
partner. Liam’s stature renders him to take life easy as he is given everything
on a platter. However, when he returns home his father treats him like he is
just anybody else around home. He has to wash the dishes and ride the bicycle. I
reckon men should be sent to the countryside in order to learn to do their own
work, that way a lot of friction would, and could, be avoided between a couple.
I know I could go on and on, but I reckon I shall
stop here with a footnote that much as cinematic experiences may drum
into our hearts and minds that life is so and so, and we have to live it with
such and such philosophies, fact is that life is
rarely dramatic – it is a steady rolling forward of events that make us who we
are, and it is the people who are around us who bring such events to light, and
this is one striking experience watching Forever My Girl left me with. I cannot but
think of Susan Sontag here who ruminated in her diary, “Nothing is mysterious,
no human relation. Except love.” Or even Rainer Maria Rilke who said, “To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human
being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the
ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but
preparation.”
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