Thanks for reading and your continued support. As always I'm interested in your thoughts, and whether this resonates with you. Maybe I'm completely full of it! Let's talk about it sometime.
Images: 1. The lightning rod salesman and the two little whisperers 2: Google's definition of the C word 3: Seth peeling tape 4: Always and Never (detail)
Bonus section! Cut from the essay above, for those of you with the saintly patience to have made it all the way down here:
The sad truth is that no one is ever one thing. People are prisms, shooting light out at all angles. Or curved glass, bringing small things into clarity (and sometimes making mountains out of molehills.) They can also focus the sun into a beam so strong that they can set the world on fire. And as we learned from Alfred, some people just want to watch it burn.
Who are the best villains? The ones who can show you a glint of their humanity. This is the only comfort we find without involving permanence, because a villain who can make us feel allows us the great gift of feeling justified. All of our mistakes don't seem so bad when you see what Darth Vader is getting up to, blowing up whole planets and such.