Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 7

This film is about love, loss, memory and the pain involved in fallible human relationships. It also has the weirdest casting of any movie I have seen, with Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, etc. The connection between love and memory is an interesting one. In fact, Yale professor Miroslav Volf has a book dealing with this issue, called "Exclusion and Embrace." He ties together the idea of memory and identity. Amnesia is only bad if you have a good past to remember, similarly memory can be a place of blessing or one of curse. This is shown well in this film. Maybe the embrace of pain is an ethic that we should live by when it comes to relationships with others. Sounds like the definition of compassion, one of the virtues.

Narratives in general have a strong sense of memory. The present moment is just between imagination of a future and the memory and learning of the past. So, what's your story, and how does that shape the character of your living? Is is faithful, or just an incoherent beautiful mess? Most likely, for me at least, it is "somewhere in between what is real and just a dream."