Ending up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
February 10, 2009 3:35 PM   Subscribe

The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known. Roger Ebert looks back on a long career and waxes philosophical.
posted by The Card Cheat (60 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sometimes I just don't get Roger Ebert. Many of his reviews have been illuminating, but this... it sort of reminds me of a freshman philosophy essay.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 3:47 PM on February 10, 2009


Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, baby.
posted by resurrexit at 3:48 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it; he died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owed, as 't were a careless trifle.
posted by found missing at 3:49 PM on February 10, 2009 [4 favorites]


Many of his reviews have been illuminating, but this... it sort of reminds me of a freshman philosophy essay.

Fractals man, fractals.
posted by geoff. at 3:53 PM on February 10, 2009 [2 favorites]


See, Roger? This is what happens when you take pills from another person's prescription.
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:54 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


He looked into the void, and the void ... it looked back, man!

I didn't make it through the article. Maybe a good friend of his died recently. Maybe he stared too long at a fractal-generating screen-saver too long while thinking of intelligent to write Hotel for Dogs. But I don't think Shakespeare will be forgotten soon, nor are the vast majority of words tossed into this electronic ether anywhere as lasting as Shakespeare's. Billy will live on in high school essays, theater in the parks, and some questionable movies for quite a while. He is gone some 400 years, yet his words persist in some form. I'm fine with my own blatherings and insight being lost in the fray. At least I took part, or something.
posted by filthy light thief at 4:00 PM on February 10, 2009


Eh, I know you guys think you're being sort of cool and jaded and above it all, but you'll get what he's saying eventually. When someone you care about is dead, and you realize all the late night conversations you had with her now only exist for you, and when you're gone, they are gone, and the worst part is you don't even remember it all right. The whole dust-in-the-wind thing is only trite until it's you, my friends. May you all live long enough to hear the vapid Diablo Codies of your day snark emptily at your twilit regrets!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:04 PM on February 10, 2009 [47 favorites]


Boo, cynical snark-laden mefites, boo.

I like Roger Ebert.

I mean, yeah, it's clear he just read a Cary Tennis column. But let the man indulge himself on his own blog after everything he's been through.

And, frankly, I think the point he makes is important to remember from time to time. "Do, or do not; there is no 'try.'" (That's not exactly it, but close enough.)

(on preview, what kittens for breakfast said. Kittens for breakfast?)
posted by gohlkus at 4:07 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


Roger Ebert is a kind and generous man. His musings on death are well put. The comments below his essay are pretty interesting, as well.

When you get old and your friends start dying, you cannot help but think about death and what your life means and what civilization will come to. My particular 56-year old bodymind doesn't mean much to me though. I care more about my daughter and the 150 teenagers I meet every day in my job.
posted by kozad at 4:11 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known.

It's not so bad then that 'the day will come when the words of Ebert are no longer known', eh? In about five years.

There, there, Roger, everything will be all right-- brief stay in a nursing home, very little pain, then oblivion. Don't even think about it.
posted by jamjam at 4:12 PM on February 10, 2009




Thanks for posting that. I am enjoying his blog.

For all the snarkiness in these comments it doesn't take away that he is a great reviewer. He can delineate the essence of a film and not give away its plot. Now, that's hard.
posted by zzazazz at 4:20 PM on February 10, 2009


I think Roger Ebert just smoked weed for the first time.

The Cary Tennis article.

Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today?

Yes, most assuredly. For a considerable while that is even longer than a moment in time.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:20 PM on February 10, 2009


And unless we meet some sort of near-term catastrophe, some people will be reading Ebert's movie reviews for at least the next century. I would assume he'll become part of the canon for Film Reviewing 101.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:22 PM on February 10, 2009


If I were cooler and stoned I would have made some pithy joke with my 4:20 comment. Sad face.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:23 PM on February 10, 2009


thanks for the post... interesting article...
posted by HuronBob at 4:24 PM on February 10, 2009


> It's not so bad then that 'the day will come when the words of Ebert are no longer known', eh?

Maybe you didn't read the article. He's not gloating or taking pleasure in the prospect. Quite the contrary.

> In about five years.

He'll have you beat.
posted by you just lost the game at 4:38 PM on February 10, 2009 [2 favorites]


That man needs a hug.
posted by Bonzai at 4:43 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


In the long run, we're all dead, sure...but I have a feeling Voyager 1 and 2 will wind up being humanity's longest-lasting proof of its existence.
posted by Stonewall Jackson at 4:58 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


Oh, and Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons.
posted by Stonewall Jackson at 5:01 PM on February 10, 2009


MetaFilter: A Person Has To Participate
posted by everichon at 5:01 PM on February 10, 2009


He'll have you beat.

He certainly would if I were playing the game.

But I'm not; nor am I foolish enough to go around comparing myself to Shakespeare-- and thank God I do not lack even the primitive and elementary sorts of insight into my own character required to realize that's what I am doing.
posted by jamjam at 5:02 PM on February 10, 2009


> So why then did he write? Why am I writing? Why do you write? Why are you reading? Why do we read Shakespeare? Not for a moment would I compare us to him; it simply occurs to me that we are all in the same boat.
posted by you just lost the game at 5:09 PM on February 10, 2009


> So why then did he write? Why am I writing? Why do you write? Why are you reading? Why do we read Shakespeare? Not for a moment would I compare us to him; it simply occurs to me that we are all in the same boat.
posted by you just lost the game at 5:09 PM on February 10


Eburnhysterical
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:13 PM on February 10, 2009


Ebert "doth protest too much, methinks."
posted by jamjam at 5:26 PM on February 10, 2009


The good news is that there will be Googlebots reading everything we put on the internet for all time. As soon as they achieve sentience, we're all immortal.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:33 PM on February 10, 2009


"We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet."

Um, no. Certainly the more intuitive claim is that it's always now, now, and it is forevermore not yet tomorrow.
posted by oddman at 5:34 PM on February 10, 2009


Roger should stay with Roger reviewing. Here he fventures into a path that gets him looking silly. All things fade Away. And one day all human life on earth will be consumed by the sun (or the GOP)..that The Greek plays and writing and Shakespeare et al have so far remained is in itself reassuring that so long as there are those to appreciate great art such things will endure.

mutability, entropy, and metamorphosis are still in play. But the N Y Yankees?
posted by Postroad at 5:54 PM on February 10, 2009


Ebert needs to read Boethius Consolation of Philosophy:

One thing is fixed, by eternal law arranged; Nothing which comes to be remains unchanged.

Does bare acquaintance with illustrious names alone, Impart real knowledge of the dead?

etc..
posted by stbalbach at 6:16 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


From Ebert: "In the cartoons, there are always those wild-eyed guys with a placard saying, The End is Now. We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet."

Honestly, all y'all's dismissal of him is far more trite than the piece itself could ever be.
But one day Now will come to you too.
posted by kaspen at 6:18 PM on February 10, 2009 [2 favorites]


We have some pretty absurd standards if we think talking about personal thoughts of death is something that should be left to the professionals. It's something universal, the most universal part of the human experience and something that every healthy mind has to grapple with. So this blog post wasn't profound. Profound is a damn high threshold to clear. He's a sick man thinking about the fact of his death. He's a pretty good writer. And he's sharing that. And not many people do. Because it's sort of scary and embarrassing to stop pretending that death won't happen to you or it doesn't concern you. Of course it concerns you.
posted by I Foody at 6:19 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


What is this, A Canticle for Liebowitz?
posted by plexi at 6:35 PM on February 10, 2009


kittens for breakfast's remains the best comment in this post. Most of the rest trying to drown each other out to dismiss Ebert's words just make them all the more poignant.
posted by JHarris at 6:36 PM on February 10, 2009


I'm pretty sure I'll be getting favorites on random mefi comments till the heat death of the universe.

In all seriousness, though, when I was in my teens and early 20s, I used to obsess about this stuff, about how fucking CLOSE death is, if you think about it, now the morbid thought-circle around the idea of my own mortality comes less often, and sometimes when i least expect it.

I'm over 30 years old now. I have 2/3rds of my life left to go, if I'm lucky. Maybe only 1/2. Years go by like hours now. If I don't distract myself from thinking about it, I get this dread that constricts me. This vertigo, like I'm leaning over a high cliff and there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff, and that scares the shit out of me, frankly. Terrifies, might be a better word.

But I mean, what can you do. You come from nothing, you become nothing, and in between you live, and try to forget about it.

Someone pass me another beer.
posted by empath at 7:17 PM on February 10, 2009 [2 favorites]


I love Ebert.
posted by callmejay at 7:21 PM on February 10, 2009


I love Pioneer 10.
posted by Kikkoman at 7:29 PM on February 10, 2009


The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known.

Ironically, if people stop reading as much it'll probably be because of things like shitty Hollywood movies.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:36 PM on February 10, 2009


May you all live long enough to hear the vapid Diablo Codies of your day snark emptily at your twilit regrets!

Once I'm done parsing this I'll come back with something especially sharp and incisive.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:50 PM on February 10, 2009


But I mean, what can you do. You come from nothing, you become nothing, and in between you live, and try to forget about it.

I try to imagine that space-time exists as a complete whole, and we are written permanently in its unchanging structure.

That helps. Sometimes.
posted by Alex404 at 8:03 PM on February 10, 2009 [3 favorites]


Bravo, Kittens. I found this piece an infinitely sad, a well-deserved retrospective. Please give him room, given his recent brush with mortality. Thankfully, I don't have too much stake in the immortality of my words (though I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a bit of a rush when I saw in my mefi profile that I had been favorited ;>), but anyone who has put his or her thoughts out there for public consumption, staking their success on engaging others, hell-anyone who has such a huge (haha) place in popular culture (thumbs up) really *ought to write this kind of a piece to shake up his regular readers.

I worked with Roger Ebert about 10 years ago on a benefit in Chicago for Access Living. He did a great keynote on disability and film. He was, of course, a wonderful entertainer at the event, but he was also delightful to work with. In retrospect, having too much wine and suggesting that his interpretation of Fight Club was Fascist may not have been the best way to thank him for his generous involvement with our benefit. But it certainly makes this piece all the more moving. Thank you for posting.
posted by njbradburn at 8:18 PM on February 10, 2009


THE FRACTALS
posted by sgt.serenity at 8:33 PM on February 10, 2009


Ebert "doth protest too much, methinks."

Oh, thank you for linking to the source of this incredibly obscure quote, ye who would snark at a terminally ill writer. It's kids like you that make Metafilter increasingly more Farktarded by the day. Well done, grasshopper.
posted by joe lisboa at 8:52 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


It's kids like you that make Metafilter increasingly more Farktarded by the day.

...Eh, I just dismissed the snarking as people trying to make jokes about something that scares them on some level.

We all have to face that fear at some point, and we do when we're ready; Ebert has, and he wrote about it. ...Some people are trying not to, and so they snark.

All in good time.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:59 PM on February 10, 2009


From Ebert: "In the cartoons, there are always those wild-eyed guys with a placard saying, The End is Now. We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet."

Actually what they usually say is "The End Is Nigh".
posted by turgid dahlia at 10:01 PM on February 10, 2009


Count me in the Ebert camp as well, as much as I disagree with him sometimes. The man has always seemed brilliant in a very sad way to me, though not having met him personally, I couldn't speak to how he is in real life. But think about it - here's a guy who is absolutely devoted to film as a medium, who can still easily give himself over to its joys even as he has to dissect it, and who knows seemingly every little thing about it instinctively, but that also includes the personal knowledge that he can't successfully create it himself.

Ebert's been around way more than long enough to know that with all the hassles, crises, budgets, conflicting egos and painful compromises that it's a small wonder any movie ever gets made at all, let alone the occasional good one. The only reviewers I read with any regularity are Ebert and the gang at the A.V. Club, because they are the two that seem to share the sort of sympathy for the filmmaker that most will snark off in order to compensate for not making films themselves. They know that some films are better than others, and deserve credit for that, but they only really get nasty about things that seemed to be made with no real artistic goal in mind to begin with, or those which show a callous waste of potential.

My favorite piece of Ebert's writing comes in the introduction to his book Your Movie Sucks, which features post-review correspondence of his with two well-known insufferable pricks, Rob Schneider and Vincent Gallo. The title of the book comes from an incident where Schneider had placed a full-page ad denouncing L.A. Times critic Patrick Goldstein for taking a shot at him. Ebert responded with this particularly scathing review, just an example of how badass he could be to someone who treated his beloved medium with such crass disrespect.

The correspondence with Gallo went much differently, however. After panning The Brown Bunny upon seeing it at Cannes, the two ended up in a match of playground taunts, including Gallo wishing colon cancer on Ebert and Ebert saying, "although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of The Brown Bunny." Ebert's review of the re-edited version tells the story better than I can.

The man's a damn good writer, and a soulful individual, and all that he can hope to leave behind on this earth are his words. He wasn't comparing himself to Shakespeare, jamjam; he was making the point that the greatest writer in the history of the language will one day be forgotten, and so what the hell chance do his movie reviews have?

And I think the answer is: not as good a chance as Shakespeare, but a helluva lot better than Ebert is giving himself credit for.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:08 PM on February 10, 2009 [2 favorites]


I agree wholeheartedly with the anti-snark contingent here.

When you who would snark about this piece of writing have paid as much attention to anything as much as Roger Ebert has to film can match his output and better it - then you can whinge on as much as you like.

Until then, to the man his due.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 10:11 PM on February 10, 2009


The elephant in the room is the ego. That's what's really at stake here. The question of whether your own works live on for all time becomes kind of moot if one is genuinely able to transcend that concern.
posted by stinkycheese at 10:17 PM on February 10, 2009 [1 favorite]


By which I mean that, if we were living in a different culture or with a different belief system, these questions would lose relevance.
posted by stinkycheese at 10:19 PM on February 10, 2009


Contrary to what he writes, a word unread on the internet is unlike a tree falling in a forest as the word has a meaning without us reading it, yet the sound of a tree falling requires our ears to interpret it as sound.
posted by dobie at 10:58 PM on February 10, 2009


He can muse on the nature of life and death all he pleases, he's not winning me back after I watched Hustle & Flow based on his glowing review. Ugh, what a crap movie. You've burned me one time too many, Rogey baby!
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:25 AM on February 11, 2009


The concept of forever doesn't exist in any tangible ways for humans. Most people have trouble comprehending and internalising history in a concrete way. What happened in the past is no longer real for the majority of us. The combined weight of human achievement is will ultimately be forgotten.

That said, Ebert can go fuck himself.
posted by slimepuppy at 4:16 AM on February 11, 2009


Contrary to what he writes, a word unread on the internet is unlike a tree falling in a forest as the word has a meaning without us reading it, yet the sound of a tree falling requires our ears to interpret it as sound.


Gee, I never thought of it that way. I guess you're right. Err, wait. No, you're totally wrong.
posted by Trochanter at 5:21 AM on February 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


Gee, I never thought of it that way. I guess you're right. Err, wait. No, you're totally wrong.

"Sound waves-- molecules of air vibrating at various frequencies-- do not themselves have pitch. Their motion and oscillations can be measured, but it takes a human (or animal) brain to map them to that internal quality we call pitch" -- pg 22 Levitin, "This is your brain on music", Plume 2007
posted by dobie at 6:47 AM on February 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


Wow, what a lot of nasty people here. :-(

His movie tastes and mine are pretty dissimilar but we're talking about someone who wrote thousands of essays, came very close to death, lost the ability to speak (imagine what that's like!) and is probably under no illusions about the extent of his life-expectancy.

For him to muse on his legacy and to say, "Well, I'm no Shakespeare but I might help you understand him or at least choose a movie based on his work, and I'm happy with that" was very moving to me.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 6:47 AM on February 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


Sincerity: Your kryptonite.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:21 AM on February 11, 2009


With all the pictures of multicolored fractals and the references to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, I can't help but wonder if Ebert isn't trying go the Aldous Huxley route and make preparations to start tripping balls on LSD on his deathbed.
posted by jonp72 at 8:36 AM on February 11, 2009


Navelgazer, I Foody, you just lost the game, et. al., you make excellent points.

I apologize for my boorishness.

If Ebert were to see this thread, I think he would have to be touched by the way people have rallied to his defense, and by the evident regard you all have for him personally, as well as for his work.
posted by jamjam at 8:51 AM on February 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


Quality of Ebert's essay > Quality of Metafilter snark.
Game over.
posted by speug at 11:16 AM on February 11, 2009 [2 favorites]


The elephant in the room is the ego.

Indeed.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:06 PM on February 11, 2009


There is no right or wrong. There is only thinking that makes it so.

makes darn sense, damnit
posted by Kennerd at 1:41 AM on February 12, 2009


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