One Day
…and the compelling draw of tragedy
Recently Netflix released a 14-part drama called ‘One Day’ based on the novel by David Nicholls. Everyone was talking about it, so I dabbled and got quickly hooked. A few people have asked me what I thought about the series, so here are a few musings…
The drama centers around the two main characters, Dexter and Emma, who meet at Edinburgh University. Dexter is from wealthy stock; he parties hard and because of his wealth and gender, he is the loveable cad, the eloquent bounder. Emma is the hard-working, bespectacled northern lass from far less affluent stock, so wary of students like Dexter.
But…in episode 1 they get together on their final day at university and each subsequent episode portrays a tragic yearly progression. The series is littered with pregnant pauses and missed opportunities, the antithesis of Carpe diem.
Watching Dexter is a sobering reminder of the isolating terror of wealth. Despite the privileges he enjoys, his longing for love is never quenched. Acquaintances are all around, but having experienced intimate vulnerability with Emma, his culture and wealth render him unable to neither; warn himself from vacuous consumeristic hedonism, or even see how to find, what he truly misses and longs for…such is the arrogance and blindness of affluence.
Every episode with increasing brightness, highlights Dexter’s way, it is a window into all our semi-narcissistic hearts. For so long it’s all about him; his day of joy, his day of grief, his day of love, his day of success. But there is one day when his money can’t control the narrative, a day of reckoning. It is the day that breaks him and the day that makes him.
I won’t give the story away, but episode 13 should come with a warning, it is so final and so raw and in that final breath the episodic build-up of tragedy reaches its crescendo, wonderfully accompanied by the haunting music of ‘Falling Colour’ by Vanbur.
This series was hard to stop watching. Why? Because tragedy is so compelling. It is the default of our temporal existence and Dexter and Emma, like so many of us, live their lives imagining, but never experiencing. They taste vulnerability, intimacy, and love, but they never sit down to enjoy it fully. You want to scream at them; “say something…do something”, but they are suspended in a frustrating stand-off of missed opportunities and unspoken loves.
Tragedy is compelling as it voices reality, but it is to be avoided and it can be avoided. We may not find the love we long for, our Dexter or Emma may never be, but there is an intimacy where the tragedy has been expunged so we might only know its beauty. An intimacy we were created for, an intimacy we existentially long for whether we know it or not, an intimacy that is found ‘running back up the sunbeams to the sun’.
C.S. Lewis used that phrase in his ‘Letters to Malcolm’. He was listening to the beauty of birds singing in the trees but wanted to point out that even the most beautiful things in this world are foretastes, mere shadows of the infinite beauty and love of God. So Lewis writes…
““What sparkling flashes of God’s wit and brilliance—His coruscations (glitterings)—have caused your mind today to run back up the sunbeam to the sun and given you cause to give thanks and to worship the Lord?”
In the years we are given, we can waltz from tragedy to tragedy, lurching into the default lived reality of so many, or we can reach higher, ‘running back up the sunbeams to the sun’.
Please share this if you think it might be helpful for those you know and love.
