Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Judge of all the Earth

There was a play I went to yesterday. One of the shorts was about a self-confessed god-fearing virtuous man, who worked in a job who exposed him to corruption yet he remained strong. In a momentary lapse, he fell to weakness and was overtempted by sin.

I liked the play because it portrayed both sides convincingly. The religious absolutist vs the 'liberal' who espoused the truth of human nature.

It's not a duality that you get to see established often. I have Views about religion, but the play danced through these conventions with ease and ended up sympathizing with the protag even though he represented that which usually makes me uneasy; blind morality, unswerving faith, the jazz.

I'm currently working on a play called Icarus, which is about the sun, obv. It's about how the sun affects us as people (see what I did there? I just made it sound about fifty times deeper than it actually is. Try this at home kids!)

More precisely it's about how we as a people... let me rephrase, how you or I as a person would react to a world-changing event such as a man-made solar eclipse that lasted for months.

What would allow for such power to be put into the right / wrong hands? Who gets the say? Who gets to take responsbility for the devastating effects to the ecology? To anthropology? Human psychology? What's to stop us from emulating Arthur C Clarke's Nightfall, where an entire planet goes insane because of fear of darkness?

Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?


Edit: Isaac Asimov, not Arthur C. Clarke, wrote Nightfall. Thank you Naoko.

3 comments:

Chrys said...

Um.. I swear! I'm not dumb! Sorry for getting those 2 mixed up.

Naoko said...

Ano... it sounds like another one of Isaac Asimov's writings as well. Can't remember the name, but the planet went mad every 10k years or so because an eclipse happened and they could not take the light. They had three suns and all three would be eclipsed.

-C said...

'Can't remember the name, but the planet went mad every 10k years or so because an eclipse happened and they could not take the light. They had three suns and all three would be eclipsed.'

'What's to stop us from emulating Arthur C Clarke's Nightfall, where an entire planet goes insane because of fear of darkness?'

In which upon googling I find that it was indeed Asimov and not Clark, but you're still a big silly, just cause I say so.