Alone

Alone. Anne Rice said that is how she must find answers to eternal questions. As a human being, she was left alone to figure out solutions to good and evil. Who is Anne Rice? Why does Anne Rice matter? For those who may not know, Ms. Rice is most famous for her supernatural thriller novels. Her special focus had been on vampires. Tom Cruise famously played Lastat, a character based on Rice’s well known volume Tales of a Vampire. Then, suddenly, Anne dedicated herself to Christianity. Her conversion lasted a few years during which time she wrote two novels about Jesus. But two years ago, Ms. Rice renounced her belief in Christianity. It was during a National Public Radio program that Rice was asked how she answered eternal questions after renouncing Christianity. Rice answered

“If there’s a modern temper, it’s that we are alone now,” she says. “A lot of the institutions in the past that gave us guidance are now suspect. Yet we still want very much to be good people. A lot of people feel this way; we are left alone to figure out answers to right and wrong, good and evil, and eternal questions.”

Rice is now obsessed with living out a good life but doing it on her own.

Anne Rice’s search for the good life is exactly what the Hollywood film Young Adult wants to find. Academy Award Winner Cherlize Theron plays the role of Mavis Gary who is trying to relive her glory days from high school. Theron’s character is a writer of young adult fiction which is just as much yesterday’s news as Mavis herself. You see at the age of 37, Mavis Gary is still a young adult. Mavis tries to go back to revive her place in her old home town. But, as you might imagine, the old home town is having nothing of it. Mavis is still the same self-centered, could-care-less-about-others, belligerent, arrogant, know-it-all that everyone loathed then and still does now. Mavis never grew up after high school. Yet, while Mavis is still searching for the good life, her old home town is jealous of the life she has. It seems they want it too. In a tragic final scene, we discover that one of Mavis’s near-classmates has spent her disappointing life imagining what it must be like to be Mavis. So-called “coming of age” movies do not declare the obvious truth. Underneath it all, people view their own lives as empty; loneliness is a void to be filled.

Both Anne Rice and Mavis Gary are alone. There is one problem with searching for answers to the good life alone: you only have yourself to talk to. For Moody Radio, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.

Mark is glad he is not alone.  To be aired by Moody Radio sometime April-June, 2012.