Last-Minute Shopping

In celebration of today’s nationwide opening of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” —

See also my Sermon for St. Patrick’s Day. 

This contains the following metaphysical observation from Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale:

“Nothing is random.”

For those who, like the protagonist of Joan Didion’s

Play It As It Lays,

feel that they “know what nothing means,” I recommend the following readings:

From Peter Goldman’s essay

Christian Mystery and Responsibility:
Gnosticism in Derrida’s The Gift of Death —

The gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death, giving the secret of death, a new experience of death. (33)”

The above-mentioned sermon is a meditation on randomness and page numbers, focusing on page 265 in particular.

On page 265 of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce,  we find the following remark:

“Googlaa pluplu.” 

Following Joyce’s instructions, and entering “pluplu” in the Google search engine, we find the following:

“Datura is a delusional drug rather than a hallucinatory one. You don’t see patterns, trails, or any cool visual effects; you just actually believe in things that aren’t there….  I remember holding a glass for a while–but when I raised it to my mouth to take a drink, my fingers closed around nothingness because there was no glass there….

Using datura is the closest I’ve ever come to death…. Of all the drugs I’ve taken, this is the one that I’d be too scared to ever take again.”

— PluPlu, August 4, 2000

 
For those who don’t need AA, perhaps the offer of Ed Harris in the classic study of gangs of New York, “State of Grace,” is an offer of somewhat safer holiday cheer that should not be refused.