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24.209 Spring 2004 Word Count: 2,486 The Silence in Heaven: Finding Meaning In Life How does the individual find meaning in a life where they can find no hard evidence of a higher being? Through leaps of faith? Through the existence of humanity? Or by rejecting the suggestion that there is a meaning in life? Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal is an examination of the nature of man’s existence, and how he finds a reason to live. The film opens with the knight, Antonius Bloch, awakening from sleep. He rises to pray, and we immediately see the disillusion in his eyes. The knight has just returned from fighting in the Crusades, which has instilled a deep ambiguity of the existence of God. It is then that Death himself enters the scene, in the severest white and black. He tells the knight that his time is up, yet the knight resists by urging Death to play chess with him. As long as the knight continues to play this game, he can continue to live. The knight has come to the conclusion that life only has if God makes His existence shown. As we see him literally playing for his life, Bloch becomes obsessed with only one thing: knowledge. He goes to receive Confession, and unknowingly confesses to Death himself. Although the conversation is quite lengthy, it is a fascinating depiction of the doubts and questions of the knight, and much of mankind. KNIGHT: I want to talk to you as openly as I can, but my heart is empty…The emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust…Through my indifference to my fellow me, I have isolated myself from their company. Now I live in a world of phantoms. I am imprisoned in my dreams and fantasies. DEATH: And yet you don’t want to die. KNIGHT: Yes, I do. DEATH: What are you waiting for? KNIGHT: I want knowledge. DEATH: You want guarantees? KNIGHT: Call it whatever you like. Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should he hide himself in a mist of halfspoken promises and unseen miracles? (Death doesn’t answer.) KNIGHT: How can we have faith in those who believe when we can’t have faith in ourselves? What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to? And what is to become of those who neither want nor are capable of believing? (Death still does not answer.) KNIGHT: Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse Him and want to tear Him out of my heart? Why in spite of everything, is He a baffling reality that I can’t shake off? Do you hear me? DEATH: Yes, I hear you KNIGHT: I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal Himself and speak to me. DEATH: But he remains silent. KNIGHT: I call out to him in the dark but no one seems to be there. DEATH: Perhaps no one is there. KNIGHT: Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can live in the face of death, knowing that all is nothingness. DEATH: Most people never reflect about either death or the futility of life. KNIGHT: But one day they will have to stand at that last moment of life and look toward the darkness. DEATH: When that day comes… KNIGHT: In our fear, we make an image, and that image we call God. DEATH: You are worrying… KNIGHT: Death visited me this morning. We are playing chess together. This reprieve gives me the chance to arrange an urgent matter. DEATH: What matter is that? KNIGHT: My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.
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