Listening to the Politics Results

We had Alien on the big screen. Clive watches it all the way through at least once a week. Then there are the daily screenings we let run each afternoon. He's writing an alternative version in which everyone listens to Ripley from the start.

Just then the film had reached the point when Ripley is trying to reason with her captain, Dallas, saying "wait a minute, if we let it in the ship could be infected".

We both looked up - I was reading a 90s novelisation of The Addams Family, while live-tweeting my reactions to it; Clive was watching The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner at double speed - a few seconds of peace passed between us.

"Listen to me", she was saying, "if we break quarantine then we could all die". We went back to our distractions.

Hannah Arendt on Legacy

Extract from Arendt's speech to the American Society of Christian Ethics, 1973:

"Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be. I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it."