My last afternoon in New York was a quiet one, or so I intended. The Frick Art Gallery, tucked into Henry Clay Frick’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, is a sanctuary from the city, and I had come to see the Vermeers. But as often happens in great museums, my feet led me away from the popular rooms toward a smaller, dimly lit alcove dedicated to works of attribution.
The piece itself was small, a single panel, but the quality was undeniable. It was clearly Italian, perhaps Florentine, circa 1505. The texture of the paint, the specific sfumato effect on the skin tones, and the deep, rich pigments—that distinct Renaissance blue and the vibrant velvet—spoke of a master. Yet the brass plaque beneath it read: Unknown Painter.
When I raised my eyes to the composition, it was as if the room had suddenly shifted. It wasn’t just a shock; it was a physical sensation of disorientation.
I stood before a double portrait. The figures, captured in that precise moment of the 16th century, were seated closely. One was a figure with long, flowing silver hair and a full, neatly kept beard, wearing a cream-colored doublet. The other, a woman with voluminous, dark cascading curls, was dressed in a sumptuous velvet robe. Her arm was draped around his neck, and her hands rested over his chest, adorned with a collection of rings and an ornate, decorative chain bracelet that the artist had captured in meticulous detail.
I knew those faces. I knew the specific lines around the man’s smile, the gentle but direct gaze in the woman’s brown eyes, and even the unique curvature of her nose. I knew them with an intimacy that a history textbook or even a photo gallery couldn’t provide. I pulled my smartphone from my pocket and navigated to my photo roll.
I scrolling through recent images and selected a picture from the image_0.png file—the portrait of me and Robin.
There was no mistake. It was beyond likeness. The artist, painting five hundred years ago, had rendered the identical, specific features of our faces. The contours, the proportions, and the subtle, individual expressions had been painted with such precision that it defied mere coincidence. I looked back and forth, from the image_0.png file in my palm to the painting on the Frick’s wall.
The sensation was not just uncanny; it was time-altering. To see our own visages, so familiar and immediate, rendered as a priceless, centuries-old masterwork, felt like having a dream of someone and then meeting them in an ancient, sun-dappled courtyard. Robin would never believe me. The painting was not a mirror; it was a revelation of continuity I wasn’t prepared to receive. I snapped a photo of the unknown Renaissance double portrait, the Frick plaque below it, and my own hand holding the reference photo from image_0.png next to the canvas. I would need every bit of proof.
Pip: Ghost Dog is a site where someone reads Dostoevsky on a Tuesday and ends up at Bergman, Camus, and the silence of God before the week is out — which is either a warning or a recommendation, depending on your Tuesday.
Mara: Benn Bell's recent writing pulls on a single thread — what happens when the seals come off, when what was hidden either floods out or stays silent. Let's start with the seals themselves, and what Dostoevsky, Bergman, and Camus each find when they look.
The Seventh Seal: Silence, Liberation, and the Unanswered Question
Pip: The post opens with a passage from Dostoevsky's White Nights that sends the writer down a long road — through biblical legend, Bergman's chess match with Death, and Camus's confrontation with a universe that won't explain itself. The question at the center is deceptively simple: what is a seal, and what do we find when it breaks?
Mara: The Dreamer in White Nights gives the image its first shape, and the post reads it closely: "The seals are removed, and suddenly everything inside the Dreamer can flow. He's not merely happy; he's overflowing with the possibility of human connection."
Pip: So the seal isn't a lock on something cosmic — it's the barrier between a man's inner life and anyone else. When Nastenka listens, the floodgates open. The liberation is real, but the post asks whether it's lasting or just a new surface for old fantasies.
Mara: And then the post pivots to Bergman. In The Seventh Seal, the seventh seal opens not to a flood of words but to the opposite — Revelation 8:1, silence in heaven for about half an hour. That silence is what Antonius Block encounters in his whole quest.
Pip: A knight returns from the Crusades wanting God to speak, plays chess with Death to buy time, and gets nothing but quiet. That's a rough return on a religious investment.
Mara: The post lingers on one scene in particular — Block confessing his doubts to someone he believes is a priest, only to realize he has been speaking to Death. He has exposed everything to the very thing he was trying to outwit.
Pip: What the post does well is hold Dostoevsky and Bergman in the same frame without forcing them to agree. One man is released from silence; the other goes looking for an answer and meets more silence.
Mara: And Camus arrives to name the structure underneath both. The post draws on The Myth of Sisyphus — our hunger for meaning meeting a world that won't confirm it — and on The Fall, where Clamence confesses endlessly without getting any closer to freedom, which the post sets against Block's moment of quiet grace.
Pip: Block distracts Death long enough for a young family to escape. He never gets his answer, but he gets an action. The post's conclusion is careful: "Perhaps the answer isn't spoken because it must be lived."
Mara: That's where the post lands — not on resolution but on a way of continuing. The seal may come off and reveal nothing definitive, and the question becomes whether you can live inside that uncertainty without surrendering to despair.
Pip: What stays with me is the image of the floodgates and the silence sitting right next to each other — one man pouring words out, one man waiting for words that never come.
Mara: Both responses to the same unanswered question. Next time, we'll see where that thread leads.
Dostoevsky, Bergman, Camus, and the search for truth
In rereading White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, I encountered this passage:
The Dreamer tells Nastenka that he feels like the spirit of King Solomon after a thousand years imprisoned beneath seven seals, which have finally been removed. He then says that a thousand floodgates have opened in his head and that he must pour out his words.
The seven seals is a familiar reference. It got me to thinking. My question is: What underlies this reference? I remember the Seventh Seals from the Bible and a movie by the same name.
My research reveals fascinating legend involving King Solomon, supernatural imprisonment, and seals that bind powerful spirits. But there’s a distinction worth making: the story of Solomon being imprisoned in a jar for a thousand years until the seventh seal was removed is not a well-established biblical story. It sounds like a blending of several traditions involving Solomon, demons, magical seals, and the number seven.
And an important distinction: Solomon isn’t the one imprisoned. It’s his spirit, or, more precisely, a supernatural being associated with Solomon in the legend. In the Jewish, Islamic, and later occult traditions Solomon’s magical ring gives him power over demons.
In the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, chapter 5 onward, a scroll is sealed with seven seals. As the seals are opened, apocalyptic events unfold.
Why Does Dostoevsky Use This Image?
I think the symbolism is especially revealing. The Dreamer has spent his life emotionally imprisoned in solitude, fantasy, and unexpressed longing. When he finally meets Nastenka and feels a connection with another human being, something inside him breaks free. His words pour out because his inner world has suddenly found an audience.
The image works on two levels: The mythological level: a supernatural spirit is released from its confinement. The psychological level: a lonely man is released, temporarily, from the prison of his own isolation.
And there’s a wonderful irony here: the Dreamer describes this liberation in such an elaborate, theatrical way that Nastenka gently teases him for sounding as if he’s reading from a book.
That’s Dostoevsky having a little fun with his own character.
I particularly like the connection between the seven seals and the thousand floodgates. The seals are removed, and suddenly everything inside the Dreamer can flow. He’s not merely happy; he’s overflowing with the possibility of human connection.
I am wondering: is Dostoevsky suggesting that Nastenka truly frees the Dreamer, or that she merely gives his fantasies a temporary outlet? This might connect with other literary ideas I have been thinking about lately.
Another question I have: What is the exact nature of the Seal? Also, I like the reference to the Seventh Seal as it is one of my favorite movies by Ingmar Bergman. What is the connection?
Dostoevsky and Bergman are approaching very different subjects, but both use images of things being sealed, concealed, and finally revealed. And given my interest in Camus and Sartre, I think there’s a rich existential question hiding in this comparison.
What exactly is a seal?
The answer depends on which tradition we’re talking about.
In the biblical Book of Revelation, a seal is essentially a mark of authority and a means of securing something that is not yet to be revealed. Revelation transforms that physical object into a cosmic symbol.
In Revelation 5, a scroll in God’s hand is sealed with seven seals. No one is initially found worthy to open it. Then the Lamb, representing Christ, is declared worthy to open the scroll.
Each seal that is opened reveals another vision of judgment and catastrophe. When the seventh seal is opened in Revelation 8:1, there is silence in heaven for about half an hour. That is the silence of God that Bergman is suggesting in his film, The Seventh Seal.
But what does the seal mean in White Nights?
Here we must distinguish Dostoevsky’s literary allusion from the biblical text.
The Dreamer says that he is like the spirit of King Solomon, released after a thousand years under seven seals. He immediately compares this release to a thousand valves opening in his head, compelling him to pour out a river of words.
Notice what Dostoevsky is doing: he borrows the grandeur of a supernatural legend to describe an intensely personal experience.
The Dreamer has spent years locked inside his own imagination. He has dreamed of companionship without really experiencing it. Now Nastenka is listening to him, and he can finally express himself.
I would interpret the seals here as the barriers that separate the Dreamer’s rich inner life from actual human connection.
But there is an irony. Has Nastenka really freed him? Or has he merely found a new person around whom to construct his fantasies? His liberation might be real, but it may also be temporary.
That ambiguity is what makes the passage interesting.
What about Bergman’s The Seventh Seal?
The title of The Seventh Seal comes directly from Revelation 8:1. Bergman uses the biblical image to frame a film about mortality, faith, and the apparent silence of God.
The knight, Antonius Block, returns from the Crusades to a land devastated by plague. He plays chess with Death, hoping to delay his end while searching for answers to questions that faith has failed to settle.
Here is the fascinating distinction between the two works.
In White Nights, the opening of the seals represents a personal outpouring: a lonely man suddenly feels that he can speak and be heard.
In The Seventh Seal, the opening of the seventh seal leads not to a flood of words but to silence.
That silence is central to Bergman’s existential drama. The knight wants evidence that God exists, that life has meaning, and that death is not the final answer. Yet the universe does not give him the clear response he wants.
Dostoevsky’s Dreamer is released from silence but may still be imprisoned by his fantasies. Bergman’s knight seeks an answer from beyond himself but encounters silence.
Both men confront the gap between what they desperately want to believe and what experience actually gives them.
This brings us close to Camus, too. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus examines our desire for ultimate meaning in a world that does not provide a definitive answer. The problem isn’t simply that we lack answers; it’s that we continue asking questions for which the universe may offer none.
And perhaps that is the deeper significance of a seal: it represents the boundary between what we long to know and what we can actually know.
Breaking the seal may reveal the truth. But it may also reveal that there is no answer waiting behind it.
In Bergman’s film, for me, the silence itself is what Block encounters in his quest for the truth. Perhaps the knight’s tragedy is not that he fails to find the truth, but that he cannot accept the possibility that no answer will come.
Antonius Block returns from the Crusades having risked his life for a faith that he now desperately wants to understand. He wants more than belief. He wants certainty. He wants God to speak, to make His presence unmistakable.
But the silence persists.
There’s a moment in the film that I find particularly important: Block confesses to a person he believes to be a priest, explaining his doubts and his desire to know. He speaks openly about his fear of death and his need for meaning. Then he discovers that his confessor is Death himself.
The scene is devastating because Block has exposed his innermost thoughts to the very thing he is trying to outwit. This scene has particular salience and resonance for me and has stayed with me all these years.
But I don’t think the film simply tells us that God doesn’t exist. Bergman leaves room for uncertainty. The silence might indicate God’s absence, God’s unknowability, or the limitations of our own capacity to understand.
That distinction matters.
This is where I think my reading intersects beautifully with Camus.
Camus’s Absurd is born from the confrontation between our hunger for meaning and the world’s silence. We ask the universe to explain itself, and it doesn’t answer in a language we can understand.
But Camus’s response differs from Block’s quest. Rather than continuing to demand an ultimate answer, Camus asks us to live lucidly in the absence of one, to acknowledge uncertainty without surrendering our lives to despair.
Block wants to know whether his life has a cosmic meaning. Camus might ask whether he can live meaningfully without ever resolving that question.
And there’s an unexpected moment of grace in Bergman’s film. Block distracts Death long enough for Jof, Mia, and their child to escape. In the midst of his uncertainty, he performs an act that allows others to live.
He may not discover the truth about God, but he finds an opportunity to act compassionately.
Perhaps the answer isn’t spoken because it must be lived.
I’m not suggesting Bergman necessarily intended that as a final answer. The film is more ambiguous than that. But the contrast between Block’s unanswered questions and his eventual act of sacrifice makes this interpretation compelling.
There’s a paradox here that I love: we may spend our lives searching for the meaning of existence, only to discover that the search itself has prevented us from fully experiencing existence.
Block wants an answer from God. The Dreamer in White Nights wants an escape from his isolation. Both long for something beyond their present circumstances. One seeks certainty; the other seeks connection.
And perhaps neither can be found exactly where the seeker expects.
In Camus’s The Fall, Clamence spends much of that novel talking, confessing, and analyzing himself. But does all that talk bring him closer to freedom, or does it become another prison? It’s an interesting contrast with Block, whose moment of grace comes not through an answer but through an action.
Maybe that’s the distinction: we cannot always resolve the great questions, but we can decide how to live while they remain unresolved.
As Camus might remind us, we don’t have to solve the mystery of existence before we participate in it.
Sometimes the silence remains, but we learn to live differently within it.
Pip: Ghost Dog, the site where film criticism arrives like a weather report for the soul — and today the forecast calls for revolution.
Mara: Benn Bell has a new piece up, and it's a full-throated case for a Paul Thomas Anderson film as the movie this political moment demands. Let's start with that argument.
One Battle After Another
Pip: The question this review puts on the table is a big one: can a film actually speak to a political moment, not just reflect it, but demand to be seen because of it?
Mara: The review roots itself in history first. The film's title comes from a 1969 Weather Underground statement published in New Left Notes, and the review quotes it directly: "From here on out, it's one battle after another — with white youth joining in the fight and taking the necessary risks. Pig Amerika beware. There's an army growing in your guts and it's going to bring you down."
Pip: And the review notes that the first and last sentences of that statement both appear as dialogue in the film's first act — so Anderson isn't borrowing the phrase decoratively. He's staging the argument.
Mara: The stakes the review sets are explicit: "This is the film we need to see now. A revolution is coming to America, and it won't be pretty." That's not a recommendation buried in a star rating. That's a provocation up front.
Pip: The craft case follows. Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon, which is not a light undertaking — Pynchon on the page resists adaptation almost as a matter of principle.
Mara: The review calls it "a masterpiece of the cinema" and credits the acting, writing, and direction as all superb. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro. And there's a specific formal comparison: a Tarantino-esque quality, and a deliberate homage to Bullitt — a Mustang chasing a Charger through California sunlight, elevation changes and all.
Pip: High praise, and the kind that actually tells you something — invoking Bullitt's chase is invoking a specific grammar of American tension on asphalt.
Mara: The review closes simply: "If you care about anything about movies or America, go see this movie now." No hedging. The film and the moment are treated as the same argument.
Pip: Revolution as film genre, Pynchon as screenwriter — the site is not playing it safe.
Mara: Next time, we'll see what other territory Ghost Dog decides to claim.
Pip: Ghost Dog, the blog where Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, Kentucky is apparently a punchline, and the bar tab sorts itself out in the end.
Mara: Today we're covering Benn Bell's writing on city life — specifically what it means to belong to a place, and what happens when you come back to one after a long absence.
Pip: Let's start with the neighborhood itself.
Tony's Way and the Geography of Belonging
Mara: The question this piece is really asking is what it means to become a regular somewhere — and what that status is actually worth, in a city where neighborhoods have their own cultures and their own rules.
Pip: The post sets the scene directly: "In Kensington, where Tony's Way is located, it is mainly Spanish, as in Puerto Rican. Tony's Way is a little Puerto Rican bar nestled below the elevated Blue Line in Kensington."
Mara: So the bar isn't just a bar — it's embedded in a specific block, under a specific train line, in a neighborhood with a specific identity. The geography is doing real work here.
Pip: And the way you earn your place in that geography is incremental. You walk past enough times, you become a face, and eventually Tony himself comes over to introduce you to Ricardo and Edwardo — his cousins, his security arrangement, his welcome committee all at once.
Mara: That introduction is the piece's first marker of belonging. The second comes later, on a busy Friday night, when the bouncers are frisking every man at the door and they just wave him through.
Pip: Which he initially reads as an insult — not dangerous enough to bother with — until the guy next to him offers the obvious alternative: they probably just know you.
Mara: That's the hinge of the whole story. Being known in a place is the thing that looks, from the outside, like being overlooked.
Pip: Then he moves away. Trenton, then Kentucky. Ten years pass.
Mara: And when he returns, Tony recognizes him immediately — notes that his hair was shorter, asks where he went. When he says Kentucky, Tony calls the barmaid over, and the laughter spreads down the bar until the whole room is shouting "Kentucky!" A second version of this story, posted separately under the same title, revisits that same Philadelphia frame: a city of neighborhoods, a million stories.
Pip: The detail that he drank free that day and suffered for it the next morning is doing quiet, honest work — the city gives you something, and it costs you something, and you go home glad anyway.
Mara: Which is about as clean a definition of belonging as you're likely to find. The neighborhood keeps its own ledger.
Pip: And the ledger, it turns out, has a long memory.
Mara: What stays with me is that the geography and the community aren't separate things in these pieces — the bar under the El, the walk home, the cousins in the corner. Place and people are the same thing.
Pip: There are books you read, books you reread, and then books that reread you — the ones that find new ways to indict you every time you open them.
Mara: Today on Ghost Dog, Benn Bell takes us deep into Albert Camus's The Fall — a novel about guilt, self-deception, and what it costs to finally see yourself clearly. Let's start with the book itself and what it does to a reader across three decades.
Camus, Clamence, and the Weight of Seeing Clearly
Pip: The question at the center of this segment is deceptively simple: what does it mean to reread a great book and discover you missed almost everything? The review isn't just about The Fall — it's about what changes in a reader over thirty-four years, and why some books only reveal themselves once you've lived enough to deserve them.
Mara: The review describes arriving at the novel for a third time and finding it transformed — "there on every page was an earthquake. In each sentence an incendiary device." That's not a description of a book changing. That's a description of the reader finally being ready.
Pip: And what the reader is now ready to receive is genuinely uncomfortable. Clamence, the novel's narrator — a former Parisian lawyer who presents himself as a man of pure virtue — turns out to be running a long, elaborate con, mostly on himself.
Mara: The plot mechanics matter here. Clamence is holding court in a dive bar in Amsterdam's red light district, telling stories to a stranger he addresses as "you" — which Camus makes literal. The "you" is the reader. You are the interlocutor. You are being confessed at.
Pip: The pivot from "successful humanitarian lawyer" to "man who walked away from a drowning woman" is where the novel earns its title. He hears the body hit the water. He hears the screaming go downstream. He goes home.
Mara: And that's not even the deepest charge against him. The review traces how Clamence eventually retreats into debauchery, framing it as philosophy. He quotes Camus directly: "True love is exceptional — two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom."
Pip: Which is a beautiful sentence for a man to say while drinking himself to death in the red light district of Amsterdam. Not that I'm judging.
Mara: The review is careful to show that Clamence's self-awareness doesn't redeem him — it's actually the mechanism of his continued corruption. He invents the concept of the "judge-penitent": confess your own sins loudly enough, and you earn the right to condemn everyone else.
Pip: The novel's most devastating passage comes near the end, and the review lets it run long enough to land properly.
Mara: Camus writes: "Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day." The little-ease passage that surrounds it — the medieval dungeon cell too small to stand in, too narrow to lie down in — is Camus's image for the condition of modern guilt. You can't stand up straight. You can't rest. You just crouch on the diagonal, indefinitely.
Pip: The review's conclusion is the part that stays with you. Guilt isn't only about what you do. It's about what you fail to do. Clamence didn't push anyone off a bridge. He just kept walking.
Mara: And the review closes with three spare lines that feel like Camus wrote them himself: no objective truth, the fall always occurs at dawn, and one sentence sufficient for modern man — "he fornicated and read the newspapers."
Pip: Right. On that note — the novel's Amsterdam setting isn't incidental. Those concentric canals, the circles of hell, the question of what it means to live at the bottom of them — that geography of guilt points somewhere.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that clarity comes late, and costs something when it arrives.
Pip: Clamence saw himself perfectly clearly and used that clarity as a weapon. The question the novel leaves open is whether any of us would do differently.
Movie Blurb Catching up on my Bergman. I’ve seen The Silence before, back in the 70s, when I first became acquainted with Bergman and he quickly became my favorite auteur. One benefits from the passage of time and the experience one gains from it. I watched The Silence again with new eyes and a new […]
Philadelphia Story There are a million stories in the semi-clad metropolis and this is one. Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, and in each neighborhood there is a distinctive culture or ethnicity. Each neighborhood has gradually become more mixed and diversified. In South Philly you have the Italians, in Fishtown the Irish. West Philly and […]
I have been wanting to watch this movie again ever since I saw it the first time back in 1975. It has just now become available. I was not disappointed, but I still don’t quite understand it. The outstanding things for me, aside from Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, were the visuals and the camera work, credit to Antonioni and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli. One might say style over substance, but that is not always a bad thing. The last shot is worth the wait. A long tracking shot moves outside the hotel window into the square; cars appear, then disappear; the people looking for him enter the square and move around, then the camera, in a still unbroken shot, re-enters the hotel room. I have never seen anything like it, and that is what remained etched in my memory for 50 years. It reminded me of a scene in The Stranger where Meursault looks out of a window in the afternoon, and as the day falls into night, the scene in front of him slowly changes as people move in and out of the frame and the light gradually fades. I wouldn’t be surprised if one didn’t inform the other.
The Passenger is exactly the kind of movie that can haunt you for decades without ever becoming entirely decipherable. And I think the movie’s visual experience may be more important than solving its plot.
The basic story is simple enough. Nicholson’s David Locke, a journalist who has become alienated from his own life, discovers that a dead man in the hotel room next door looks enough like him to allow him to assume the man’s identity. He effectively abandons Locke and assumes Robertson’s identity. But changing his identity doesn’t change himself.
He thinks he can escape the burden of being Locke by becoming somebody else. Yet wherever he goes, Locke, whatever is left of Locke, goes with him. The journey becomes less about where he is going than about whether a person can escape himself.
I see a comparison with Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger.
In The Stranger, Meursault is frequently an observer rather than an actor. He watches the world: sunlight, streets, people, heat, the changing afternoon. There is an extraordinary passage when he is in his apartment and looks through the window as the day changes. The ordinary world continues moving while Meursault remains strangely detached from it.
Antonioni does something remarkably similar, but with a camera.
Locke is increasingly a passenger in his own existence. He observes rather than participates. And Antonioni’s camera adopts that same detached consciousness. It doesn’t simply show us what Locke sees; it seems to think like Locke.
The ending is the key to the entire movie.
Locke is lying dead in the hotel room. The camera slowly moves toward the window, passes through the bars, goes outside into the plaza, wanders through the life of the town, and eventually returns to the room.
Cars move. People walk. The police arrive. Life goes on. The camera itself seems to abandon Locke, just as Locke tried to abandon his own identity.
And there’s something very Camus-like about that.
The universe doesn’t provide a dramatic answer. There is no grand revelation. There is simply the world continuing.
The resemblance to The Stranger is striking. I don’t know if there is a direct influence or not, but the resemblance is both synchronous and uncanny. Both works are fascinated by alienation, observation, identity, mortality, and the indifferent continuity of the physical world.
Meursault looks through the window at a world that continues without him. Locke disappears through the window into a world that continues without him.
With Antonioni, style is the substance. The camera movement, empty spaces, architecture, landscapes, silence, and duration aren’t decoration around the story. They are the story.
Once I saw her in the light of day, I suggested she might see a plastic surgeon. “Listen, sweetheart,” I lisped, “Did you ever consider plastic surgery?” Well, she turned on me. It was awful. I can see now why they used to name storms after women. She grabbed my .38 right out of my […]
