Taste of Cherry

I recently rewatched this frustrating, difficult, spare, prismatic meditation on death and realized, for the second time--having forgotten the first time--that it's not really about death, or not wholly, anyway. It's actually about the nature of appreciation. Can we both cherish a thing and long for its end? Are the two values, loss and beauty, too interdependent ever to separate persuasively? Do we fool ourselves, or, gentler, do we mistake our pleasures when we claim they justify life's pain? Or, rather, does life pain us only because we think it beautiful? Even Keats knew that loveliness needs grief. But is it grief that makes life lovely? Why is the sun's light softer as it disappears? Why does fruit taste best immediately before it sours and rots? Why do we kill the bodies that carry us? Go lie in a grave, in the rain, and find out for yourselves. A+