SPIRITUAL/REVIEW: THE LESSON OF ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

The dream vacation that turned out to be disappointingly ordinary, the perfect date who turned out be disappointingly ordinary, the job that had been our lifelong dream that, when we finally attained it, is anything but what we thought it would be. I known too many people who couldn't not enjoy their lives...their careers. their marriages, their families never quite turned out as they hoped. these people never got over their anger at God for the way their lives turned out, for all things that happened or didn't happen in their lives.

How does a person get over that bitterness, that sense of having been cheated by life? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It tell that story of a young couple who meet and fall passionately in love, and whose relationship ends in bitterness and anger. They find the memories of what they shared so unbearably painful in the light of their break-up that they choose to go through an experimental medical procedure to erase their memories of each other from their minds, leaving them with neither the glow of having know love nor the pain of its loss. First the young woman, then the man, visit a psychiatrist who has learned how to identify the precise location in the brain of a specific memory and how to erase it. Twice the movie quotes the philosopher Nietzche

Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders"

that is..it is a blessing to be able to forget the mistakes in our lives rather than live with the painful memories.....the young woman's name is Clementine,,,hinting that her fate is to be lost and gone forever.

At the climatic moment of Eternal Sunshine...a memory is triggered in the young man's brain, in order to be erased. It is the memory of a time when he and his lover were together and he says to her.....This is the happiest I have ever been in my life. At that point, he wonders why he is having the happiest moment of his entire life erased from memory justbecause its aftermath is so unbearably painful.

My answer is that if we could not remember would we will still be us? Those painful moments are such a large part of making us who we are, as the young man in the movie ultimately realizes. Without those memories...am I still me..or am I someone else. What's past is past and there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. There are perhaps no sadder people than the men and woman who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since.

The sad but inescapable truth is that very few people get everything they yearn for, and most of us don't get everything we deserve. I too wish it were otherwise. I wish there was a world I could move to where everyone who loved would be loved in return, where every kind person would be treated kindly by fate and by her neighbors, a world where all ailment could be cured by the weekend and all biopsies turned out to be benign. But I don't live in that world and neither does anyone else. Ask too little of life and you run the risk of coming to the end of your days never having tasted many of the pleasures God put on earth for you. Ask too much of life and you virtually guarantee heartbreak, disappointment, and the risk of thinking of yourself as a failure.