What to Bring on the Ark

Biblical level catastrophes have been making headlines with increasing frequency. So here is a list of essentials to take with you on the Ark:

Don’t go anywhere without the DVD set of Antonioni’s trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse  (the stock exchange sequence in La Notte with Alain Delon is as essential as K rations). Life as we know it could not continue without Bergman. How could we understand personality without Persona, endure the absence of god without The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Lights, comprehend marriage without Scenes from a Marriage (Paul Mazursky would never have been able to make An Unmarried Woman without it), or appreciate life in general without Fanny and Alexander, which has nothing to do with the Romanovs, and has still less to do with Franklin J. Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra? Tolstoy told Chekhov that his plays were almost as bad as Shakespeare’s, but we need to make sure there is room for War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, along with Lear to deal with problems of aging, The Tempest and The Winter’sTale to reinforce the notion that nothing is over until it’s over, and yes, Cymbelline to remind us that beauty can exist without perfection. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is great to have in any storm, along with The Wasteland  (a poem that is starting to have practical applications in our polluted world). Make room for Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with two chickens, two turtles, two lambs, two snakes etc.