From Shameless to 2001: A Rambling of Good Quality

The final season of Shameless finally came, though in my mind, when Lip dropped out of MIT and began an inexplicable binge drinking spree, the show's peak was over.

Three or four years ago, I was experiencing the most confused day of my life, thinking about changing careers but finding many difficulties, coupled with the shadow of emotional failure, my heart was entangled and twisted, and I often couldn't sleep at night. During that period, this drama gave me a great touch. At that time, I wrote an answer to the question of "how to evaluate this play", which received thousands of approvals and often receives comments to this day. I describe "Shameless" as depicting the life of an ordinary person, not a life of striving upwards, but a life of striving not to fall. The environment and fate shape people's personalities and habits, and these personalities and habits constantly pull the protagonists into the abyss of life. At the same time, the most primitive family affection, love, and vitality support the protagonists to rebel against life, and their silent middle fingers to life are finally converged on the word shameless.

So in my eyes, this drama seems very inspirational. Its core is even similar to Rocky, except that most people can't have amazing talent and so many mentors and friends to help each other at the low points of life like Rocky, but people can still challenge their fate in different forms and ways. This may be a kind of human nature, as if there has been a myth of the father and Prometheus since ancient times, or perhaps it is also a form of the so-called quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair, which is a priori, the origin of reason and sensibility.

After reading the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for more than a month now, I have been constantly thinking about the concept of "good quality", although according to the book, it is undefinable due to the transcendental nature of good quality, because it precedes definition and develops the rhetorical technique of definition. The reading experience of the book always reminds me of Dharma Wanderer, which also has "Zen" and "highway" elements, giving me a similar sense of immersion, but the former is clearly more speculative and systematic, which is also in line with the intention of the second half of the title. For "good quality", the author quotes the "Tao" in the Tao Te Ching to explain, the so-called "Tao is the Tao, the Extraordinary Tao", once it can be explained, it is no longer the eternal way. However, I still expect to "get a glimpse" of good qualities in my life.

The most intuitive association that good quality gave me came from the black stone tablet in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The unknown black stone stele stands in the group of apes, the fearful and curious apes touch the stone stele with their hands, accompanied by the illumination of the sun (it is said that the sunlight in this shot means enlightenment, because the French light lumière, and the eighteenth century "Enlightenment" is the same word), the next scene learns to pick up animal bones as weapons to defend their own water source, which not only marks the beginning of human beings to master the use of tools, but also accompanied by the emergence of regular induction and rational thinking. I haven't seen the original 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I don't know if the black stele has a detailed explanation and allegory in the book, but I'm curious if Kubrick has read the book "Produced in the Art of Motorcycle Repair" and whether he thought of the word "good quality" when filming.

It is a very happy thing to have enough space and time to allow my thoughts to wander freely, and thinking back to the "fly camp dogs" that I was still deeply involved in a few months ago, I can hardly feel the existence of the "good quality" of life, and now I am extremely fortunate. For me, it seems to me to take a step out of the tediousness and look back as if it were an indispensable part of life, as Milan Kundera said in Living Elsewhere: "When you live elsewhere, it is a dream, it is art, it is poetry, and when it becomes here elsewhere, the sense of sublimeness becomes the other side of life: cruelty." ”