The words of a ghost

It took until the very final moments of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky for me to sit bolt upright in my seat and get some real resonance from the film. It was not a resonance I could immediately place, though, making it all the more ethereal.

It’s some words spoken by the writer of the book on which the movie was based, who functions as the narrator in the film, though he only has about three short sections of “narration,” two of which are right near the start. That’s Paul Bowles. His last lines of the film, the last lines of the film, are:

“Because we don't know when we’re going to die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

For Bowles, they were particularly limited due to his already advanced age, as he was 80 when the movie was released. He did live nine more years, dying 50 years after the release of his book, and in that time I hope he watched the full moon rise as much as he could.

But the basic profundity of his words were not what struck me. Immediately I knew I had heard them before.

I raced to the internet to google them, thinking they must be from a movie. I mean, many of my references are from movies. Sure, I could have read the words somewhere, but I specifically remember them spoken, in a context I found very poignant. I doubt that happened in a TV show; even less likely, on stage.

So I googled them and got references to The Sheltering Sky, of course, and then references to some random interview with Brandon Lee –

Wait, that’s it. Brandon Lee.

I watched the little 24-second clip, which was from the last interview of Bruce’s son, the star of The Crow and a few (a depressingly few) other films. Lee had committed Bowles’ words to memory, and for some reason saw fit to produce them in this interview, almost as though he had a premonition of his own death.

This is where I’d seen Bowles’ memorable quotation. I’d watched Brandon Lee’s last interview on my Crow DVD. Or actually, at that time, it would have been my Crow VHS. I never got it on DVD.

They’d certainly seemed poignant to me at the time, which is why I remembered them. But it was likely more than 20 years since I last heard them, and of course did not remember their source, which was a movie that had only just come out three years previous at the time Lee invoked them. He might have gotten them from the book, but he references the movie in the clip. And it was a movie I’d picked up at the library for no other reason than that I was familiar with the title and remember it getting some awards buzz 30 years ago. I didn’t even know what it was about, and in fact, I tried to watch two other films on my DVD player first, landing on this one due to technical difficulties with the others that are too boring to get into now.

The thing is, The Sheltering Sky does not really seem to be about that quotation, per se – it doesn’t seem like a final encapsulation of the themes we’ve just been absorbing. The movie is about travellers seeking transcendent experiences, which was what Bowles was doing, which caused him to settle in Tangier for the remainder of his days. But it is not specifically sentimental about the finite quantity of life’s experiences, even as it deals with death and danger and great transformation. In fact, though I did like the movie, I think Bowles’ words would have fallen on deaf ears for me at that point, had I not drawn them up from the distant recesses of my own memory.

And so on a random night in February of 2020 I had occasion to again mourn Brandon Lee, who died on a random night in March of 1993. The point is, it’s all random, and we don’t know what things we should be appreciating because they may be the last times we do them.

Another reminder that we should live our lives to the fullest – I’d say a timely reminder, but we never have any idea how timely it may be.