Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

Jonathan Franzen writes of freedom, in his work of the same name. The question, seemingly, is how we are to make sense of ourselves in modern society. The great triumph of the liberal, democratic ideal, is that people should be free (within quite broad parameters) to create the world as they see fit. Unmoored from any sense of binding responsibility - save taxes - any non-legal morality is entirely of our creation. When social pressure is no longer adequate to keeping us in-line, how do we balance our actions?

Lost in Translation, in setting Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson adrift in Tokyo, makes all of these points eloquently, if not a touch heavy-handedly. With nothing else familiar except a like-minded stranger, is it any wonder that they become each-other's only grounding certainty? Which of us hasn't felt the world, and our lives, spinning out of control around us? Sometimes the only anchor-point will be a similarly confused, scared partner; when everything is foreign, even the smallest of common ground might bind us to each other. When everything else drops away, we can still have each other. Irresponsible? Selfish? Perhaps. But, at times, someone else may become our whole world. It is part of the vast panoply of human experience. The horizon disappears entirely and time and being is composed of this one relationship; this here and now. If we are unmoored, then we can likewise recreate our lives at any second. Before this: the past. Beyond here, lies nothing.