Other than the emptiness without him of my whole Compare them with a poem from Thomas’ Frequencies (1978), “The Absence” (which might have served Bergman as a title): Tomas’ words in Winter Light are less artful than Thomas’, of course, but they express a similar spiritual torment. There’s the same craggy austerity in both (Tomas and Thomas, as in “Doubting”), the same dourness broken by fits of passion. Both artists defied us to bow to the pressure of the age and understand their work psychologically rather than spiritually. Thomas lived another nine years, wrote some of his most heartbreakingly personal poems, and died at age 87. Thomas’ wife of 51 years, Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, died in 1991. Thomas, yet their images, in memory, align perfectly. At last, free.” I’m quoting from A Film Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants (Winter Light), The Silence, translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin and published in 1967.ījornstrand looks nothing like R.S.
#DON THOMA CHIFF AND FIPPLE FREE#
( Pause) God does not exist any more.” And then: “I’m free now. She backed me up, encouraged me, helped me, plugged up all the holes. In my darkness and loneliness I hugged him to myself – the only person I showed him to was my wife. That’s why I hid him away from the light, from life.
![don thoma chiff and fipple don thoma chiff and fipple](https://image1.slideserve.com/2174325/player-interviews-l.jpg)
“Every time I confronted God with the reality I saw, he became ugly, revolting, a spider god – a monster. He visits the pastor seeking reassurance and Tomas tells him: A parishioner, Jonas Persson (the equally great Max von Sydow) is a fisherman tormented by the fear of nuclear annihilation. He is still in love with his dead wife but carries on an affair with a school teacher, Marta (the great Ingrid Thulin). A pastor, Tomas (played by Gunnar Bjornstrand), undergoes a crisis of faith. My favorite among Bergman’s films remains the first one I saw, on public television, in the late nineteen-sixties – Winter Light. In one of his sermons, Meister Eckhart said: `God is nameless, because no one can say anything or understand anything about him.’”īergman died on Monday, though it feels as though he died decades ago – a feeling we experience when an artist we enthusiastically discovered in our youth is suddenly gone. Those following the via negativa attempt to express knowledge of God by describing what He is not – a rhetorical strategy known as apophasis (`to say no’). “God, by definition is ineffable and defies language, a feeble human creation. Here’s what I wrote about the “negative way” last year: Poet and director shared a Northern landscape and a temperamental bleakness, and both returned obsessively to the theme of the via negativa. I’m not certain the Welsh poet-priest saw a single film in his life, but I’m not talking about influence.
![don thoma chiff and fipple don thoma chiff and fipple](https://worldfolk.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Tin_whistles-768x576.jpg)
Thomas seriously, accumulating as many of his books of poetry and prose as I could find and afford, his work persistently reminded me not of George Herbert or Wordsworth or the other poets he cited as elective affinities, but of Ingmar Bergman.