Thank,you, Dennis, for those kind words. I too believe that God sends us people for certain seasons of our lives. Certainly in my case I have “moved on” dozens of times and not always of my own accord. I don’t have any friends left over from high school, college, medical school, or residency; largely because my worldview is inherently different from the majority, and finding friends is not a matter of effort, my choices, or chance but directed from the outside.
I am very happy, no, more at “joyful”; to count you as my friend and intellectual classmate/foil. My other friend is Ken Beggs, who is an anesthetist recently retired from our hospital, whom I have known for several decades. So there are two of you; Ken, for most of those years, was my most cheerful and kind pagan—raised Catholic but Vietnam
How is than tolerance, then? Words are more than tricky when applied to reality, since words are mere tools, and reality can only be briefly affected by our propaganda. C.f. the Holocaust. “We are hot and you are not!”
I have more to say about word-religion of course; but as food for thought, ponder these by Ingmar Bergman when he announced his retirement from the film industry: “I’m done with all that whoring.”
And in a related (?) incident: “I hope I never get so old that I get religious.”
It would be interesting to know how long he lived after that; and whether he just faded to zero like Sartre, or did the logical Camus thing and commit suicide—so as not to grow that old?
I have always loved Bergman's movies. I saw my first one in 1962 at an art theater in Peoria.
ReplyDeleteAs to how his life ended....
Bergman is not a man of the cloth: he does not set out to bring us to salvation through faith. He is hardly a believer himself, in any traditional sense. In one of his increasingly rare public appearances, at the Ingmar Bergman Week in Fårösund in July 2005, the eighty-seven year-old, yet obviously sprightly, Bergman was drawn into a discussion with the Bishop of Visby, Lennart Koskinen, who had been invited along to talk about the religious themes in Through a Glass Darkly. "Bishop Koskinen," Bergman called out from his seat in the audience, "do you believe in God?" Koskinen replied that he did indeed, and unsurprisingly Bergman was asked the same question by another member of the audience. He answered that he was totally convinced that he would see his last wife once again (- Ingrid, now deceased), and that "Christ is a philosopher who gives testimony to the existence of other worlds. Just as Bach does."
Bergman retired from filmmaking in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was making a difficult recovery. He died peacefully in his sleep,[24] at his home on Fårö, on 30 July 2007, at the age of eighty-nine,[25] the same day that another renowned film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, also died. He was buried on the island on 18 August 2007 in a private ceremony. A place in the Fårö churchyard was prepared for him under heavy secrecy. Although he was buried on the island of Fårö, his name and date of birth were inscribed under his wife's name on a tomb at Roslagsbro churchyard, Norrtälje Municipality, several years before his death.