Quote Post: Last Refuge

“Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.” 

— Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

My favorite movies from when I was in graduate school — Brewster McCloud (1970), The Iceman (2012), Basquiat (1996).

The Dichotomy of Empathy: Exploring Fragility and Vulnerability

Empathy can be perceived as a double-edged sword. It offers the gift of understanding and relating to others, yet it also brings forth a keen awareness of our own and others' fragility. 

Bobbi and the Strays is an animal care Non-profit in Queens, New York that places pets with caring adults and families.
(image credit: Greig Roselli)

Empathy emerges when we recognize our own fragility. This recognition of our vulnerability often leads us to realize that others may share similar experiences of fragility because, just like us, they are mortal. This shared sense of fragility may result in a comforting realization that we are not alone.

However, we are often in conflict with this reality. There's a part of us that resists acknowledging this fragility. Instead, we seek to safeguard our vulnerabilities, essentially becoming protective of our emotional state. This duality of recognition and resistance is what makes empathy a complex emotional experience.

Let's translate this into a relatable context such as a classroom. There might be moments when we feel vulnerable yet safe, as in the case of an older student taking care of a younger one. On the contrary, there may also be instances when we feel vulnerable and instinctively wish to shield ourselves, especially in environments where we feel unsafe.

In the photograph above, I was in a park in Queens and discovered Bobbi & the Strays, a New York City-based non-profit that places animals with caring adults and families in the city. It is like the ASACP but with intentionality.

Do you think the classroom is the right place to discuss and implement empathy-based care? In the pet shelter? In the office or courtroom?

What if empathy became the litmus test for assessing who is competent and who is not in their job or role or position. That would certainly change everything. Instead of status or privilege or worse power people are instead assessed by their virtues, espcially how they practice empathy or not.

Of course — empathy is a delicate balance between recognizing our own vulnerability, understanding the fragility in others, and managing our innate desire to protect ourselves. It's a profound human experience that shapes our interactions in personal, professional, and educational settings.

Check out the Stones of Erasmus teaching product on this topic: 

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8 Films Worth Rewatching: Total Recall, Contact & More

STONES OF ERASMUS — FILM & PHILOSOPHY

Eight Films to Watch Over and Over Again

Some movies invite a second viewing because I want to spend more time in their worlds. Others leave an argument unfinished. Following my earlier list of films worth returning to, here are eight more: a little science fiction, some difficult love, a dreadful disappearance, and a generous helping of comic trouble. On Friday evenings I've been watching one from the list below.

I created a question for you to take with you as you before, during, and after viewing and provided some quirky, philosophical capsule reviews of the 8 seemingly unrelated movies.

8 Quirky Films to watch on Fridays

Date	Film

01

Total Recall (1990)

Friday, April 17, 2026

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Can a purchased memory become part of who you are?

Some vacations promise a change of scenery. Total Recall offers a change of self. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker tempted by a company selling implanted memories of adventures he has never lived. Naturally, the purchase goes spectacularly wrong. Paul Verhoeven turns that premise into a sweaty, grotesque carnival of Martian rebellion, corporate power, and bodies that refuse to behave. I love how the movie lets its philosophical problem wear the loudest possible costume.

What makes a memory yours? How much of an identity can somebody else manufacture? Even the action feels suspicious: perhaps the heroic adventure is exactly what Quaid ordered. Meanwhile, the struggle over breathable air gives the fantasy a blunt political edge. This is a world where survival itself has a price tag. Return for the outrageous effects and breakneck momentum; stay with the uneasy possibility that pleasure can make a convincing substitute for truth.

Film details: AFI Catalog.

02

Contact (1997)

Friday, April 24, 2026

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

What happens when experience outpaces proof?

Contact makes listening look like an adventure. Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway searches the sky for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but the movie's deepest longing feels human: somebody, somewhere, might answer. Adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, Robert Zemeckis's film moves between radio telescopes, political maneuvering, religious conviction, and private grief. Foster gives the spectacle its center. Her attention is so intense that waiting for a signal becomes dramatic.

I am especially interested in the friction between what Ellie can experience and what she can persuade others to believe. The film sometimes announces its ideas too emphatically, yet its generosity toward wonder keeps pulling me along. Science requires evidence; being human also involves trust, imagination, and the ache of absence. Contact lets those demands trouble one another. Watch it again for the movement from cosmic scale to a single face, and for its insistence that curiosity can be an act of hope.

Film details: Walker Art Center.

03

Raising Arizona (1987)

Friday, May 1, 2026

Directed by Joel Coen; written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Can longing for a family justify taking from another’s?

The Coen brothers give the American dream a stolen baby and send it running through the desert. Nicolas Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, a repeat offender who marries Ed, a police photographer played by Holly Hunter. Unable to have children, they decide a local family with quintuplets can spare one. Their reasoning is terrible. Their longing is painfully recognizable. Raising Arizona gets its energy from that collision: absurd criminal logic rubbing against a sincere wish to become better people.

I delight in the elastic camera, the runaway dialogue, and Cage's expression of permanent bewilderment. Hunter supplies an equally essential conviction; Ed treats this ridiculous enterprise with absolute seriousness. Underneath the diapers, chases, and escalating disasters sits a question about deserving happiness. Can wanting a family excuse what you do to obtain one? The movie keeps its affection for these fools while allowing their dream to look both beautiful and dangerously selfish.

Film details: Disney+ film details.

04

My Night at Maud's (1969)

Directed by Éric Rohmer

A snowy evening, an apartment, a conversation that refuses to end: Eric Rohmer understands how much suspense articulate adults can generate. Jean-Louis, a Catholic engineer, thinks he knows the shape his future should take. An encounter with the divorced Maud makes that certainty less comfortable. My Night at Maud's brings Pascal, probability, desire, and religious commitment into the same room, then watches people use ideas to explain themselves. Or to conceal themselves. That distinction is where the pleasure begins for me.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Francoise Fabian make intellectual exchange feel intimate, competitive, and faintly dangerous. The beautiful black and white photography gives their talk room to breathe. Pay attention to the pauses as carefully as the arguments. A person can construct an elegant account of his principles while remaining obscure to himself. Another viewing invites us to hear what these characters reveal when they believe they are being perfectly clear.

Film details: The Criterion Collection.

05

Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (1974)

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Two lonely people dance, and suddenly the room seems to belong to everybody judging them. Rainer Werner Fassbinder builds Ali: Fear Eats the Soul around Emmi, an older German cleaning woman, and Ali, a younger Moroccan migrant worker. Their attachment exposes the racism and possessiveness of neighbors, coworkers, and family. Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem give the relationship a tenderness that makes each hostile stare hurt. I find the framing devastating: doorways, staircases, and empty spaces turn ordinary places into instruments of exclusion.

Yet Fassbinder also follows prejudice into the relationship itself. Loving someone does not automatically undo the habits a society has taught you. That complication gives the film its enduring force. Its bright colors and deliberately arranged scenes invite us to look closely at behavior we might otherwise accept as ordinary. Return to the dance, then watch how difficult it becomes to sustain that shared space.

Film details: The Criterion Collection; additional context.

06

Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

Directed by George Sluizer

A roadside stop, a missing woman, a man who cannot stop searching. George Sluizer's original The Vanishing takes an ordinary interruption and makes it feel like a tear in the fabric of daily life. Rex's determination to discover what happened to Saskia becomes the film's terrible engine. What unsettles me is the patience. Sunlight, family routines, and reasonable behavior remain visible while something monstrous takes shape among them. The movie shows us enough of the abductor to redirect our curiosity, making knowledge itself feel increasingly dangerous.

We want an answer because Rex wants one, and that identification becomes a trap. I would keep the ending unspoiled for anyone approaching it for the first time. For a return visit, notice the construction: small gestures, rehearsals, and casual details acquire a dreadful weight. This thriller understands the appetite for certainty so precisely that it makes the desire to finish a story frightening.

Film details: The Criterion Collection.

07

La Cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children)(1995)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro

Imagine a fairy tale assembled from rusted machinery, green fog, and the contents of a troubled toy box. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make The City of Lost Children a place you can almost smell. Krank, a scientist unable to dream, steals children in an effort to appropriate their dreams. Against his machinery stand One, a circus strongman played by Ron Perlman, and Miette, a resourceful girl played by Judith Vittet. Their unlikely partnership gives the elaborate nightmare a beating heart.

I enjoy the film's willingness to be excessive: strange faces, impossible inventions, and images that seem to have escaped from sleep. Beneath that abundance sits a simple cruelty. Adults want something from children and build an entire apparatus for taking it. Tenderness becomes a form of resistance. Watch again for the details crowded into the frame, but keep your attention on the trust developing between these two vulnerable allies.

Film details: Sony Pictures Classics; additional context.

08

3 Ninjas (1992)

Directed by Jon Turteltaub

After all that metaphysical uncertainty and European anguish, I am making room for three brothers who can handle a kidnapping attempt with martial arts and teamwork. Jon Turteltaub's 3 Ninjas follows Rocky, Colt, and Tum Tum, whose grandfather trains them while their FBI agent father pursues an arms dealer. The setup turns family tension into a child's fantasy of competence: grownups underestimate you, danger arrives, and the skills you practiced suddenly matter. Victor Wong gives Grandpa the warmth that holds the silliness together.

The jokes are broad, the villains broader, and subtlety rarely enters the room. I appreciate the uncomplicated pleasure of watching siblings become allies. Their bickering makes cooperation feel earned, even when the action cheerfully abandons plausibility. On another viewing, the appeal is less about suspense than rhythm: training, trouble, improvisation, escape. Sometimes a movie earns its place through the generosity of letting children imagine themselves capable together.

Film details: D23: Disney A to Z.

Stones of Erasmus — Arts, letters, and a little philosophy at the movies.

Analog Collage and Intimacy in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s We Begin to Let Go

Explore Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s We Begin to Let Go through memories of analog collage and a close look at intimacy, texture, and a figure’s gesture.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby and We Begin to Let Go (2013), The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Collage is becoming a lost art—or at least analog collage is. I do not mean that people have stopped making collages. Digital collages are everywhere. But before design programs made it possible to cut, layer, and rearrange images on a screen, collage required physical materials: magazines, scissors, paper, and glue.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I would cut images, headlines, and intriguing scraps of language from magazines I had read. Entertainment Weekly was a particular favorite. I kept the clippings carefully, as though I were building an archive for some future version of myself who would know how they all belonged together.

There was something comforting about the ritual: the slight resistance of the paper against the scissors, the accumulation of fragments, and the freedom to remove an image from its original context and give it another life. A collage did not begin with a blank page. It began with the discarded pieces of other worlds.

So, when I look at Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s We Begin to Let Go, what strikes me first is its use of collage: fragments assembled to reveal a domestic scene.

I notice the central figure’s legs draped in blue stockings and her blue high heels. She is seductive, bare on top; the juxtaposition of skin and fabric makes her seated pose dramatic. And then I notice the chair and the floor, a pastiche of newspaper collage, ephemeral in appearance. But it is the face that cements Akunyili Crosby’s work. What collage magic is this? But, no. She is painted in acrylic—a Mona Lisa hidden among the paper, charcoal, and pastel. The mark of the artist. The mark of the pose.

She looks away from the viewer and away from the man behind her. Perhaps he is her companion, or perhaps there is something sinister about his presence. I read their relationship as transactional: he, like a modest pimp, takes care of her, while she adamantly looks away. Preserves her animus.

His garish orange trousers and patterned shirt speak out, as do his flat-soled sneakers—also blue, but not stylish like hers. Maybe he is telling her something, stooping the way he is, while she reluctantly listens but never gives him her gaze.

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Narcissus Beyond Vanity: Echo, Ameinias, and Desire

I recently found myself rereading the story of Narcissus as told in Book Three of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Completed around 8 CE, this Latin epic gathers and reshapes stories of transformation from the Greco-Roman world. The myth of Narcissus has itself been reimagined countless times, becoming one of the most recognizable stories inherited from classical antiquity.

The familiar version is often reduced to a simple warning: Narcissus is so self-absorbed that he falls in love with his own reflection. Ovid’s account, however, is more precise—and more unsettling. Narcissus is a beautiful young hunter who scorns everyone who desires him. After one rejected admirer prays that Narcissus might experience love without ever possessing the beloved, Nemesis answers the prayer.

Narcissus finds his image in a pool of water.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Narcissus at the Spring ; after Parmigianino" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1525.

At an untouched spring, Narcissus encounters his reflection and becomes transfixed by it. At first, he mistakes the image for another person. Even after recognizing himself, he cannot free himself from his desire. He remains beside the water, gradually wastes away, and dies. When the nymphs come to prepare his body for burial, they discover in its place the flower that bears his name.

This is why the myth cannot be explained entirely as a warning against excessive self-love. Narcissus does not demonstrate healthy love for himself; he desires an image that can neither answer nor exist apart from him. He is made to experience the same unrequited longing that he inflicted upon others. The story is therefore not only about vanity. It is also about failed reciprocity, the difference between an image and a person, and the destructive loop created when desire cannot recognize another human being.

One of the most intriguing discoveries to emerge from my latest reading was the story of Ameinias, a young man who persistently pursued Narcissus. An important distinction must be made, however: Ameinias does not appear in Ovid’s version of the myth. His story belongs to an alternate Greek account preserved in Conon’s Narrations, a collection composed around the same period as Ovid’s poem.

In Conon’s version, many young men desire Narcissus, but Ameinias remains especially devoted to him. Narcissus rejects Ameinias and cruelly sends him a sword. In despair, Ameinias uses the weapon to take his own life at Narcissus’s doorway, calling upon a god to avenge him. Narcissus later sees his reflection in a spring and recognizes his suffering as a just punishment for the pain he caused Ameinias. Unable to endure his impossible desire, Narcissus kills himself, and the narcissus flower springs from the earth where his blood was spilled.

Placing Ovid’s and Conon’s accounts beside one another changes our understanding of the myth. In Ovid, Echo can only return another person’s words, while Narcissus can respond only to his own image. They are two figures trapped in failed forms of communication. In Conon, the tragedy is sharpened by Ameinias’s rejection and plea for retribution. Both versions turn rejection into a structure of return: the suffering Narcissus dismisses in others eventually comes back to him as an unbearable desire of his own.

This is one reason rereading ancient myths can be so rewarding. Familiarity sometimes flattens them into a single moral or supposedly definitive version. Greek and Roman myths, however, developed organically through competing traditions, local stories, poetry, art, and retellings. Their variations are not mistakes to be eliminated; they are part of what gives mythology its richness.

For teachers interested in exploring these variations with students, I created a Narcissus and Echo teaching resource for middle and high school ELA and Humanities classrooms. The myth can also be paired with this critical-thinking and movement activity, which asks students to take a position on questions such as whether Narcissus was justified in rejecting Echo and what the myth suggests about romantic relationships and unrequited love.

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A Small Act of Care: Making Eggs for Someone You Love

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An Egg for you
(image credit: Greig Roselli)

Today I made eggs for a friend, and something about it made me feel good. Not simply because I know how to boil an egg, but because I took my time with it. I put the eggs in the water and cooked them just enough so that the yolks stayed soft and tender, not chalky, and the whites were silky and smooth.

Then I sat there and peeled them—three eggs, one by one.

I gave one to my sister and the other two to my two children.

And somehow, that was enough. There was something comforting about making something simple and giving it away.

But I realized afterward that I hadn’t kept an egg for myself.

So next time I make eggs with you, I’ll make enough for both of us.

And we’ll sit down and eat them together.

Poem in Free Verse: I Stood by a River Tree