[MD] Where have all the values gone?

[khaled Alkotob]

 A few days ago there was a Japanese movie on AZN cable and the few
minutes that I saw showed 4 grand kids sent to spend a vacation with
their widowed grandmother. One day a lady visits the grandma, they just
sit on a tatami facing each other and not a word is spoke. The grand kids
are amazed and the younger one telling the older how not a single word
has been exchanged. When the camera is on them, the viewer feels a little
strange and awkward watching 2 people visiting without the exchange of
words, then as you transcend dialog, time, place, culture, nations,
oceans, generations, stereotypes and prejudices you suddenly hear the
conversation between the to elderly widows. 

The movie was Rhapsody in August
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_August

well and I leave you with Paul Simon's "the dangling conversation"

It’s a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost.
Like a poem poorly written
We've are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
Can analysis be worthwhile? 
Is the theater really dead? 
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.



 "Scott Roberts" <jse885 at localnet.com> writes:
> Arlo, Erin
> 
> Arlo said:
> In short, of the four dialogic modes in this discussion:
> 
> Public-intimate
> Public-chit chat
> Private-intimate
> Private-chit chat
> 
> We are moving, on a cultural level, towards near exclusive 
> engagement in the
> "Private-chit chat" mode. A day of solitude, ideally hoping it would 
> foster 
> 24
> hours of "private-intimate" dialogue would be a good thing.
> 
> Scott:
> What about no dialogue at all, which is what I assumed "absolute 
> solitude" 
> would mean. There is also this, from Pascal: "the sole cause of 
> man's 
> unhappiness  is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own 
> room." 
> Well, "sole" cause may be stretching it, but I think he has a point.
> 
> - Scott 
> 
>