Dazzled to death

Having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the classic Cold War spy tale by John Le Carre, I'm eager to see, A Most Wanted Man, a movie (release date, July 25, 2014), based on another spy novel by the maestro.

But my interest in A Most Wanted Man is mostly piqued by the fact of the actor (sadly no more) Phillip Seymour Hoffman's presence therein.

Hoffman plays the role of the central character, an ex-spy and a tortured soul who has to adapt and adjust to the new geopolitical imperatives of an era defined by 9/11. 

Hoffman is Le Carre's personal choice; the novelist plays an active role in selecting actors for films based on his novels. 

Of Hoffman, Le Carre says the following:

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors are intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came with a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect.
Phillip took vivid stock of everything all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw his eyes or be dazzled to death. He went seven times round the moon to your one, and everytime he set off, you were never sure he'd come back, which is what I believe somebody said of the German poet Holderin: Whenever he left the room you were afraid you'd see the last of him. And if that sounds like wisdom after the event, it isn't. Phillip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it.

"Dazzled by death" is part of a fabulous characterization of Hoffman as man and and artist, as it brings to mind the figure of the moth. The moth, as Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said, is drawn to the flame (he says "star" as in "the desire of the moth for the star/Night for the morrow"), almost by instinct. It took half a century for a Virginia Woolf to bring out the dark side of the moth's devotion: death. In The Death of a Moth, a short essay, Woolf ponders on the brief life and imminent death of a moth that veers toward a candle she has lit in her room. She looks at the moth and thinks of how the flame dazzles it to death.

A good way to go, confronted by that which bedazzles.

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My own private American science

President Barack Obama is all for research and development in science and technology in the United States. 

The President dutifully spoke of the significance of investing in this area of human knowledge--the usual "creation of jobs" and "strengthening of the economy."

I'm disappointed, as I expect a guy like the President, who joked about not doing well enough in physics to become the "Science-in-Chief" of the nation, to transcend the economic rationale.

Science is best pursued when its "disinterested", i.e. pursued not to fulfill some direct or tangential, central or peripheral, economic motive, but for the development of humanity at large. Any economic fruit should be borne incidentally.

However, economics is unfortunately the primum mobile of the President's American innovation initiative and of all innovation initiatives globally. According to the NYT, the particular speech, which I believe is a speech representative of a worldwide trend, cleverly conceals from the narrative, a "vital backstory, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America."

The backstory is that "American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise."

Hollywood, a pioneer in disseminating through the guiles of art and entertainment, the "absent" facts of this reality, has been telling us for a long time about the consequences of a privatization of American science. 

Consider, scifi films like The Europa Report and Prometheus, and the most recent, Snow Piercers, among many others.