I am afraid that I have betrayed my past self again. No matter: it was a whim anyways.

One month, two months, something-like-that ago, I watched the 2016 film Arrival for the first time with a DVD copy of it I had bought for $5 (maybe $3.74?) at a Walmart over the summer. I bought a lot of DVDs at Walmart and F.Y.E. over the past year (some of which I still haven't watched) before I finally made a pact with my friend that I would stop buying DVDs if she would stop taking online quizzes.

Arrival was excellent, of course. The movie itself, I'm sure, nearly made me cry; but I also teared up at the whim that came into my mind: "This is the last 'new' movie I'll get to watch."

What I meant to myself by that, was the notion that, at that moment, I would undergo a sort of death. Many people have actually died this year, and they do not get to come with us (at least not bodily) to see the duly-produced Frozen sequel or the fourth cinematic adaptation of Little Women this holiday season or Tom Hanks trying to reboot Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for adults. Why, then, should I enjoy such privilege?

No, it would be a far better and romantic ideal to spend the next decade of my life sorting. (I link there to a fairly recent, brief John Wilson column in First Things where he talks in the first paragraph about sorting books and files, finding sorting an act of remembering. It stood out to me because, although Wilson is almost exactly 50 years my senior, I (too?) can easily conceive of my life as a series of piles—books and DVDs and papers and index cards, bought and read and written and stacked—all eventually sorted once or twice a year into relatively neat little bins that, all together, could form a decently thorough sketch of my life thus far.) I have a good many things sort of sorted, but everything's still rather messy, and I'm sure a good many objects I once chose to save would now seem extraneous. Between my unorganized files and unread books (and, of course, unwatched DVDs), I—at my mere 21 years of age—feel a dull constant awareness that I am behind on life, and not just in the classes I scrape by in semester after semester.

Really, how could I justifiably have time for New movies? There are still dozens of books I have failed to finish, scores of books in the canon that I Really Ought To Get Around To Someday, not to mention the Biblical canon, not to mention a respectable fraction of the selection over at Hearts & Minds. (I've linked to their website because I consider myself happily obligated to stan the Borgers and their bookstore. They don't have an online catalog, but this merely affords you an excellent opportunity to send them money and ask for something good in return. Byron and Beth probably have better taste than you do anyways.) At least for the next, say, 10 years, I should stay away from whatever the current fad of a superhero franchise is, and make sure I get Seven Samurai crossed off my bucket movie watchlist instead. Right?

(To clarify, that's what I mean by "a sort of death": essentially preparing for death by getting all my files in an organization that would make sense to someone besides me, catching up on all the things I've wanted to read/see but haven't, and forgoing the blockbusters that Rachel Held Evans and Brooks Argento didn't get to see this side of glory. I'm sure it will take me at least till I'm 30 if I move quickly.)

Except, rather predictably, new movies have come out and gotten good reviews—and off I go, spending relatively obscene amounts of money (even with the university student discount) to see a currently-playing movie seemingly poised to be a rollicking big-screen experience, one the already-departed cannot enjoy with us.

Ah, well: nobody living joined me at the 10pm midweek showing I attended in the local theater either.

Partway through the film, a character referenced the novel Gravity's Rainbow, one of those near-canon classics I haven't even gotten close to reading, since I'm too busy watching these movies instead. (If I ever do start reading books again, I presume reading Gravity's Rainbow will come after Brideshead Revisited and before Infinite Jest. But I'm never going to read Infinite Jest, and I also know nothing about any of those three books.)

"Hm," I thought to myself, "a reference to Gravity's Rainbow. I should read that sometime."

(I remember the first time I heard about Gravity's Rainbow. It was when I was in 10th grade, participating in some sort of Quiz Bowl-like competition. That book's title was the answer to a question that I did not get.)

"I haven't read it," the other on-screen character replies.

"Neither have I," the first character says. "No one has."

I suppose the logical end to this newsletter would be to moralize about how life is for the living, the movies that come out in the present day are my birthright, I should not be ashamed to enjoy the here-and-now, something along those lines. I don't think there's a moral here, though. I'm simply impulsive and inconsistent. To a degree, I'm fine with that.

I was disappointed but not surprised to see that Focus on the Family's Plugged In review of the film listed the driving moral imperative of the film under "Other Negative Elements", because we end up "rooting against the police" (which isn't even how I would characterize it). Mainly, though, they were just concerned about the language, which there's apparently a lot of. I, not really having been concerned about the language while watching the film, consequently have barely any idea how much swearing was in it, while Plugged In (as for every film they review) can give you a detailed tally, which seems less helpful somehow.