What I learned from 2012 Les Miserables

I haven’t found a reviewer yet who echoes my impression of the 2012 musical rendition of Les Misérables. I don’t lean toward the passionate exclamation, “Nothing short of breathtaking, triumphant and beautiful!” I also don’t lean toward the review quipped by Alistair Harkness who commented, and I’m abridging here, “Bombastic, overblown, overlong, needlessly convoluted…” His remark seems backward. The French to English language version of the book, Les Misérables, contains 530,982 words. The 2012 film, scripted by William Nicholson, Herbert Kretzmer, Alain Boublil, and Claude-Michel Schönberg, managed to effectively garner at least 250 pages into a 3 minute song. Bravo.

There are many ways to communicate, when all communication comes from Truth, Life, Love, God.

The 2012 Les Misérables impressed me with the fact that time/space and the human language are surmounted with the use of lyrics, music, acting, and visuals. All these layers together produced a grand effect that are provoking the human mind to grow out of its own codes, expectations, assumptions, and flawed views.

We need revisions, renditions, and new versions of books. I’m currently working on an abridged version of Science and Health, first written in the 19^th century by Mary Baker Eddy. I keep in mind words written by Eddy, “We should remember that the world is wide; that there are a thousand million different human wills, opinions, ambitions, tastes, and loves; that each person has a different history, constitution, culture, character, from all the rest; that human life is the work, the play, the ceaseless action and reaction upon each other of these different atoms.” (Miscellaneous Writings) The modern words of the abridged Science and Health provide an edge and speak to today’s thinkers.