Late Quartet REVIEW
C.S. Lewis once argued that when we lose a friend, we lose more than that one relationship. We lose the part of other friends that the lost friend was able to bring to the surface.
“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”
A singular loss then will have ripple effects throughout a community as readjustments must be made. In Augustus Napier’s insightful book, The Family Crucible, the author, a family therapist, discusses how families are not collections of individuals so much as organic systems. The loss of a member can be more like losing your blood than losing a hand. It will affect everyone differently as they all realign and compensate. The relationships between the remaining members all change. And sometimes, they cannot manage that change and the organism (family) self-destructs.
The film, A Late Quartet is a stunningly well executed example of how that happens using a professional string quartet as an example. What happens when one member is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and must bow out (no pun intended)? The film begins with the Cello player [soon to find out that he has Parkinsons] prophetically speaking to his class of young musicians.
"We begin with Beethoven's Opus 131. It has seven movements and they're all connected. For us, it means that playing for so long without pause, our instruments must in time go out of tune, each in its own quite different way. It's a mess. What are we supposed to do, stop? Or, struggle, to continuously adjust to each other up to the end, even if we are out of tune? I don't know. Let's find out.”
The rest of the movie will show us the struggle between the four members of the quartet as they work to adjust to this change, as they literally work to re-tune themselves together as people and not just instruments.
For a while, … it’s a mess. And you wonder if they will survive it for in the middle of this significant change, other changes that have been lying dormant emerge.
Question for Comment: Have you ever been a member of a family or institution or organization that could not navigate a personnel loss tectonic shift?
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