Monolith
“Music can name the unnameable
and communicate the unknowable.”
— Quotation attributed to Leonard Bernstein
“Finally we get to Kubrick’s ultimate trick…. His secret is in plain sight…. The film is the monolith. In a secret that seems to never have been seen by anyone: the monolith in the film has the same exact dimensions as the movie screen on which 2001 was projected.”
— Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner
My entry of Saturday, August 30,
included the following illustration:
My entry of Monday, September 1,
concluded with the black monolith.
“There is little doubt that the black monolith
in 2001 is the Philosopher’s Stone.”
— Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner
The philosopher Donald Davidson
died on Saturday, August 30.
The New York Times says that as an undergraduate, Davidson “persuaded Harvard to let him put on ‘The Birds’ by Aristophanes and played the lead, Peisthetairos, which meant memorizing 700 lines of Greek. His friend and classmate Leonard Bernstein, with whom he played four-handed piano, wrote an original score for the production.”
Perhaps they are still making music together.