[...] I have had occasion in speaking of the career of Othello to invoke Montaigne's horrified fascination by the being's horror of itself, as if to say: life is human hard, but then let us not burden it further by choosing tragically to call it tragic where we are free to choose otherwise. I understand Montaigne's alternative to horror to be the achievement of what he calls at the end a gay and sociable wisdom. I take this gaiety as the attitude on which what I am calling diurnal comedy depends, an attitude toward human life that I learn mostly from Thoreau, and partly from Kierkegaard, to call taking an interest in it. Tragedy is the necessity of having your own experience and learning from it; comedy is the possibility of having it in good time.

[...] But how can renewal come about? -- the perennial question of reformers and revolutionaries, of anyone who wants to start over, who wants another chance. Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the world (for example, a state of marriage) until the people in it change, and the people cannot change until the world changes. The way back to their marriage is the way forward, as if to a honeymoon even more mysterious than their first. Taking a leaf from Plato's Parmenides they discuss their human plight in some metaphysical dialogue, the longest stretch of philosophical dialogue among the films of remarriage, the amplest obedience to the demand of the genre for philosophical speculation, for the perception that remarriage, hence marriage, is, whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking, in the present instance, an undertaking that concerns, whatever else it concerns, change.