The rain, it falls. The sun, it shines. The wind blows. And that’s what it’s like. You’re buffeted by this, by that, and it is nothing to do with you. Someone you love dies, or leaves. You get ill or you get better. You grow old and you remember, or you forget. And all the time, everywhere, there is this canopy stretching over you.
What canopy?
Things-as-they-are. Fate. Fate. Impersonal. Irrational. Disinterested. The rain falls. The sun shines. The wind blows. A bus mounts a pavement and kills a child. ...
I believe in no systems, no ideologies, no religion, nothing like that. I simply think – Oh, it’s very very boring, this. Very – I just think that from time to time, and at random, you are visited by what you cannot know cannot predict cannot control cannot change cannot understand and cannot cannot cannot escape – Fate. Why not? ‘S good old word.
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Respect
Respect
Fate
A lovely evocation of 'what is' from one of the greatest TV writers of all time, and voiced by his best creation Philip Marlowe, played by the Great Gambon. I'm interested that the character constructs things-as-they-are as a canopy, and as fate. For me both of these are interpretations after the fact; the first a kind of suffocation, the second kind of dis-empowering, pointing as it does towards a pointlessness of action - an effect that I'm sure was intended by Potter, given Marlowe's emotional and psychological state at this point of the drama.
A great quote, thank you for posting it and reminding me of it.
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