Nobody There But Me

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

I recently read an interview of epic documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in which he pointed to the first line ("To see a World in a Grain of Sand") from that first stanza of William Blake's classic poem Auguries of Innocence, as a metaphor for Burns' philosophy for documentary-making and storytelling. Specifically, convey a huge huge event and history through small stories, picking out examples that enable you to see the wider picture though more personal events.

Today, the New York Times web site published a short documentary film on Zablon Simantov, the "last Jew in Afghanistan," a complicated man who spent years feuding with the only other remaining Afghani Jew until the Hatfeldman to his McCoy passed away a few years ago, and who, years before that, sent the rest of his family, including his wife, to live in Israel, to fulfill his destiny as the sole Jew in Afghanistan. Yet this deceptively simple, haunting work captures images of a lone (and, seemingly, lonely - yet in part of his own design) man preserving himself as the sole remnant of Jewish culture in Kabul, keeper of the Taliban-desecrated-but-still-standing synagogue, link between Israel and the East, hope and despair, faith and fear, keeper of flowers on Flower Street. It's strange and heartwarming and disturbing.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.