Job’s story is a very old one– older, probably, than writing itself, and older than the culture that preserved it as sacred text. And it concerns an enduring human problem: the problem of suffering. The problem of suffering and the question of endurance and the mystery of justice and injustice as we perceive them and experience them on earth. But Job, I think, is also about the wager between speech and silence, the weighing of eloquence against bloviation and blather, about the question of dignity under impossible circumstances. Or it’s a book– in a way like Paradise Lost, and the Jesus story, about rebellion and surrender. I am interested in how language encounters the outer limits of human experience and endures. What it means to be corrupted and to seek wisdom– or to get to the bottom of things– in corrupt circumstances. I am curious, also, about the enduring, the perennial, the inexhaustible artwork. So we’ll read Job through two films, and through the eyes of William Blake. Commentary, no matter how brilliant, will always remain distant and supplementary to our work. Always in Invisible College we are reading ourselves bifocally with text at issue: our task is not to repeat or support a canonical interpretation, but rather to draw energy, real living energy, from a story, from enduring poetry, from what happens to us when we plunge in. -Ariana
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