A Winter Reflection on Ghosts, Doubles, and the Self

by | Dec 12, 2025 | book review, Film Review, Geographical Imaginations, Potpourri

Every December, literature seems to return—almost ritually—to the scene of a man encountering himself. Perhaps this is why so many of us begin the season with Dickens. His tale of a cold-hearted clerk startled into self-recognition by the ghosts of Christmas past and future has long made the holiday into a time for temporal disturbance, when the boundaries between then and now, self and shadow, grow permeable. Scrooge’s journeys are encounters not with spirits alone but with the versions of himself he once was and the versions he fears becoming. Few stories remind us so strongly that one lifetime can contain multiple selves.

But once you open the door Dickens built, other visitors begin arriving.

A solitary bureaucrat in nineteenth-century Russia, for instance, finds himself haunted by a man who looks exactly like him, though more confident, more capable—a double who seems intent on rewriting his life. In another century and another city, a young aristocrat discovers that a second self shadows him everywhere, whispering warnings he refuses to heed. These doubles do not come wrapped in chains or dressed in Dickensian robes; they come instead as rivals, consciences, or inescapable mirrors.

Elsewhere, in the misty borderlands of German Romanticism, travelers report glimpsing their likenesses at dusk—uncanny figures who step out of dreams or reflections, as if the world briefly permits a rift in identity. And in the pages of early modernist fiction, men begin to suspect that they are composed of more selves than they can recognize, their identities scattered like fragments of glass.

Still further along the literary path, time itself loosens. A war-shaken man becomes unstuck from chronology, slipping from childhood to old age and back again, meeting himself in flashes like a traveler glimpsing his own cabin window from the train. Philosophers and novelists stage debates within the self: one man discovers that he exists differently in the mind of every person he meets, while another journeys inward to find that his “double” is less an intruder than an intimate companion.

Yet no author orchestrates this chorus of selves as quietly—or as astonishingly—as the one who waits at the center of this winter constellation.

On a bench beside a river, an elderly man meets a young stranger who turns out to be himself. Each believes he sits in a different city, a different year; each is certain of his own reality. Their conversation is gentle, speculative, edged with melancholy. One speaks from experience, the other from expectation. Neither can fully convince the other of the world he inhabits. What they share, tenuously, is the idea that identity might stretch across time like a bridge dreamed into being, holding two versions of the same life in momentary equilibrium.

When they part, neither is sure what has happened. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps it was memory. Perhaps, as so many winter tales suggest, the season itself allows encounters that ordinary chronology forbids.

And returning to Dickens, one begins to realize: the ghosts he invented are but one form of a much older visitation. Literature is full of these meetings—with doubles, with shadows, with earlier or later selves—each offering a chance to consider what it means to change, or to remain, or simply to be.

A story read in December reminds us: we are never entirely alone. Somewhere, the self we once were is waiting on a bench by a river. Somewhere else, the self we might yet become is pausing, turning, listening.

Reading List: Ghosts, Doubles, and the Many Selves

Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol (1843)

Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Double (1846)

Edgar Allan Poe — “William Wilson” (1839)

E.T.A. Hoffmann — “The Doppelgänger” / “The Doubles” (early 19th century)

Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Luigi Pirandello — One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (1926)

Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf (1927)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other” (1972)

Jorge Luis Borges — “Borges and I” (1960)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other Death” (1949)

Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)

Roots in the Sky: Returning to The Fountain in Granada

by | Jul 20, 2025 | ASKing the World, Film Review, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Hagiography, Potpourri, Spain

There are films you return to not for plot, but for weather—for their atmosphere, their gravity, their pull on your interior tides. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is one of those films for me. I’ve seen it at least ten times. Each time, I enter its spiral a little differently. Each time, it offers something else.

This time, I watched it in Granada.

Not in a theater—just me, a screen, and the layered hum of a city that refuses to stay in one time–unless, of course, you ignore that palimpsest. I’ve walked through the Albaicín, traced the patterned shadows in the Alhambra, listened to church bells echo through streets once shaped by mosques. Granada is a city that doesn’t forget. It blurs. It folds time inward. And so does The Fountain.

Watching it here, something shifted.

Where You Are Shapes What You See

I’ve always believed that place changes how we experience a film. There are movies that resonate because of when you see them—but others because of where.

Watch Talk to Her in Madrid and it becomes a meditation on distance.
Watch Pan’s Labyrinth in Segovia and the stones seem to whisper Franco’s afterlife.
Watch The Spirit of the Beehive in Castilla and the earth itself feels hollowed out by silence.

And watching The Fountain in Granada?

It felt inevitable. Not like discovering something new, but like opening a letter I’d kept folded for years.

A Familiar Spiral, Seen from a New Angle

I know this film. I know its cuts, its rhythms, its grief. I know the way Izzi smiles in the snow, the way Tom trembles with denial, the way the star—Xibalba—burns with something more than light.

But here in Granada, surrounded by centuries of conquest, devotion, beauty, and erasure, the film felt different. It didn’t just move through time—it held it. It mirrored this place where empires once chased permanence and instead found decay. Where a civilization imagined itself eternal, and was turned into ornament.

The film’s refusal to separate love from death, empire from myth, felt at home here.

Izzi and Isabel

There’s a detail I’d noticed before, but never felt quite as sharply: the Queen in Izzi’s novel-in-progress shares her name—Isabel. In the film, she’s regal, serene, sending her conquistador to find the Tree of Life in Yucatán. In real history, Queen Isabel of Castile sent explorers westward for her own tree: legacy, salvation, dominion.

And Izzi—Rachel Weisz’s Izzi—is dying, but she’s the only one at peace. She understands that death is not the enemy. It is her partner who can’t accept it, who rages and clings and unravels.

Two Izzis. Two Isabellas. One seeks transcendence through conquest. The other, through surrender.

Granada, once ruled by Isabel the Queen, becomes a strange echo chamber for this film. The question lingers: What is the cost of trying to outrun death?

The Tree, the Star, the Stone

The Tree of Life sits at the center of all three timelines in the film—rooted in the past, glowing in the future, decaying in the present. It offers healing. It demands sacrifice. It transcends.

Here in Granada, trees hold history too. The olive, the cypress, the orange blossom. They survive regimes. They outlast architecture. In the gardens of the Generalife, they feel like quiet gods.

And then there’s stone. The stones that built this city, that carry verses and scars. The kind of stones that outlive their makers, but not their meanings.

The film asks: can you live forever through what you build, what you love, what you plant?  Granada doesn’t answer. But it gestures. It points to the ruins, and then to the sky.

Death Is the Road to Awe

There’s a line I’ve always carried from The Fountain:  “Death is the road to awe.”

In Granada, that line stops being metaphor.

Here, we might think of everything as awe. The light on tiled walls. The curve of an arch built for vanished prayers. The hush of twilight in a square where languages once braided together.

But everything is death, too. Not as absence, but as transformation. This city isn’t preserved—it’s composted. Its beauty is rooted in what it’s lost, what it’s blended, what it’s become.

This time, I didn’t watch The Fountain to understand it.  I watched it to stand inside it. And Granada made that possible.

 

#   #   #

 

After ten viewings, I thought I knew The Fountain. But Granada taught me otherwise.

Some films are just films.  Others become companions—haunting you, changing with you, asking new questions as your surroundings shift.  Here, The Fountain wasn’t about escaping death.  It was about learning to carry time—in your breath, in your grief, in the trees you plant knowing they’ll outlive you.  

And in that, it felt like a conversation with this city.  One rooted in the soil. One burning in the stars.

Cinema of Quiet Observation

by | Jan 15, 2025 | Film Review, Geographical Imaginations

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) are spiritual cousins, quiet films that find profound beauty in the simplicity of everyday life. Both focus on solitary men whose lives revolve around repetition and routine, yet instead of presenting their daily rhythms as monotonous, these films reveal them as deeply poetic. Their protagonists—Hirayama, a Tokyo public restroom cleaner, and Paterson, a New Jersey bus driver—navigate their days with a quiet attentiveness, transforming ordinary moments into something almost sacred.

Routine in both films is not a burden but a form of devotion. Hirayama begins each morning the same way: stretching, watering his plants, drinking canned coffee, and riding his bike to work while listening to old cassette tapes. His job, cleaning and maintaining Tokyo’s public restrooms, is carried out with a sense of care that elevates it beyond mere labor. Similarly, Paterson moves through his days with an unchanging rhythm—waking beside his wife, eating breakfast, driving his bus route, jotting down poetry in a notebook, and ending the evening at a neighborhood bar. Their lives are structured and predictable, yet rather than being trapped by routine, they seem liberated by it. There is a Zen-like acceptance in their repetition, as if they have discovered a kind of freedom within the ordinary.

Both films are deeply connected to their settings, treating Tokyo and Paterson, New Jersey, not just as backdrops but as living, breathing characters. Wenders’ Tokyo is a city of overlooked details—soft light filtering through trees, walls dappled with shadows, and restrooms that, in Hirayama’s hands, become small havens of cleanliness and order. Jarmusch’s Paterson is likewise filled with unnoticed poetry, from street conversations to the way objects subtly mirror each other. The city itself is part of Paterson’s creative process, much like the poetry of William Carlos Williams, whose work—rooted in observations of everyday life—serves as a guiding presence throughout the film. Both Wenders and Jarmusch elevate these urban landscapes, revealing the hidden beauty found in places most people pass without a second thought.

Silence and observation play key roles in both films. Dialogue is sparse, and what is left unsaid often carries as much weight as what is spoken. Hirayama barely talks, but his silences feel full, as if he is deeply listening to the world around him. Paterson, too, is a man of few words, channeling his thoughts into the poems he writes, which capture fleeting moments and small, seemingly inconsequential details that, in his eyes, contain the essence of life. Neither man is driven by ambition or external validation; their satisfaction comes from their own quiet engagement with the world. When Paterson’s notebook is accidentally destroyed, he does not respond with anger or despair but with an acceptance that aligns with his philosophy of creation—poetry is not something to possess but something to experience. Similarly, Hirayama’s life, stripped of unnecessary desires, is filled with a quiet joy, as if he has already found everything he needs.

Music provides another layer of expression in both films. Hirayama’s cassette tapes—featuring The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, and Nina Simone—act as a window into his interior world, revealing a deep nostalgia and an unspoken past. Paterson’s poetry, though unaccompanied by a soundtrack, has a musical quality of its own, with a rhythmic, meditative flow that mirrors the gentle cadence of his days. These elements reinforce the films’ shared interest in the ways art, in its simplest forms, becomes intertwined with everyday existence.

Throughout Perfect Days and Paterson, small, seemingly random encounters leave lasting impressions. Hirayama’s quiet interactions—with a young girl fascinated by his photography, a homeless man, and his estranged sister—hint at a rich, unseen history and add depth to his otherwise solitary existence. Paterson, too, meets strangers who briefly but meaningfully connect with him, including a visiting Japanese poet who recognizes the spirit of William Carlos Williams in Paterson’s own writing. These fleeting connections remind us that even the most solitary lives are touched by others, that meaning is often found in unexpected, passing moments.

Both films conclude with quiet yet emotionally powerful moments. Perfect Days ends with Hirayama in his car, listening to Nina Simone’s “Feelin’ Good,” his usually serene face shifting through a range of emotions—perhaps longing, perhaps peace, perhaps something in between. In Paterson, after the loss of his poetry notebook, a chance encounter with the Japanese poet offers him a simple but profound reminder that poetry is not about possession but about presence. Neither film provides a conventional resolution because neither character is on a conventional journey. There is no great change, no dramatic revelation—only the continued flow of life.

Wenders and Jarmusch, both longtime chroniclers of wanderers and quiet observers, have crafted films that serve as cinematic meditations. They do not demand action but invite reflection, asking the viewer to slow down and see the world as their protagonists do. In Perfect Days and Paterson, meaning is not something to chase—it is something already present, waiting to be noticed. Through their stillness, these films remind us that poetry is everywhere, if only we take the time to look.