No Exit (1944)

Sartre's conception of hell: surprise, no red-hot pincers. More philosophically interesting and psychologically penetrating is a room with pleasant furnishing and two other likable people.

No Exit operates on a good premise and an obvious style, both of which clear some land for quality intellectual farming.
The genius with the wild eyes is not fully out to play-- his scary brainpower is restrained to a simple drama, a piece of theater stimulating and affecting. The Pillars of the Intellectual Earth are not upheaved, but Sartre contributes a play of buzzing energy and authentic worth. It's difficult to get out of one's mind.
I exit the experience (insofar as exiting is possible) wondering whether hell is the finite -- the imposing death -- or the infinite, the inescapable.
Of course, that suffering/chaos/wrongness is the rule for existence, the place to which all things return in time, is a mere proposition. I could claim as easily that in infinite time all things fall toward stability/harmony.
But I can comfortably assert that I don't want to be anywhere for infinity. Death as a release is probably among the greatest blessings the cold universe has ever given us.

Erik Satie

I'm quite intrigued by my first dip into the work of Erik Satie. He seems valuable for particular occasions... I am attracted to his refined French experimentalism--- do his short piano pieces not parallel wonderfully the films of the New Wave? I am interested in his musicality, and feel a physical interest in his sensual, sophisticated whimsy. I saw him frantic, pounding, lurching, wandering.... all with a distinct peculiarity, a distinct personality. I liked it; it cannot change me, cannot move me-- but I will learn for it.