Word: monoliths
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...that matter, the Democratic Party is hardly a monolith either. Last week 17 of the nation's 24 Democratic Governors gathered in St. Louis to discuss the candidates-and decided nothing. Awaiting Hubert Humphrey's announcement, the Governors resisted Kennedy pressures for an endorsement and concluded, as New Jersey's Richard Hughes put it, that "a pause is clearly in order...
...monolith has previously guided man to major evolutionary and technological progression, it leads Bowman now into a realm of perception man cannot conceive, an experience unbearable for him to endure while simultaneously marking a new level in his progress. The frozen shots intercut with the light sequences show, debatably, Bowman's horror in terms of perception and physical ordeal, and his physical death: the last of many multi-colored solarized close-ups of his eye appears entirely flesh-colored and, if we are justified in creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed into a pallid flesh...
...this is not, as Clarke suggests in Life, the end of an Ahab-like quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the universe. Bowman is led into the time warp by the monolith. The moon monolith's radio signals directed toward Jupiter were not indicative of life as we know it on Jupiter, but were a roadmap, in effect, to show Bowman how to find his way to the monolith that guides him toward transcedent experience...
...with Louis XVI period furniture with fluorescent-light floors. He sees himself at different stages of old age and physical decay. Perhaps he is seeing representative stages of what is life would have been had he not been drawn into the infinite. As a bed-ridden dying man, the monolith appears before him and he reaches out to it. He is replaced by a glowing embryo on the bed and, presumably, reborn or transfigured into an embryo-baby enclosed in a sphere in our own solar system, watching Earth. He has plainly become an integral part of the cosmos, perhaps...
SEVERAL less-than-affirmative ideas can be advanced. The monolith is a representation of an extraterrestrial force which keeps mankind (and finally Bowman) under observation, and manipulates it at will. Man's progress is not of his own making, but a function of the monolith--man cannot predict, therefore, the ensuing stages of his own evolution. That the initiation of man into higher stages of development involves murder casts ambiguity as to the nature of the monolith force. In its statement that man cannot control his destiny, 2001 is anti-humanistic--this also in the concept that what we consider...