Thoughts on Room

It must have been coincidence that I watched Room just after writing about Walter Ralegh and the spatiality of his imagination. Like Ralegh, who wrote the words:

The world discerns itself, while I the world behold;
By me the longest years and other times are told;
I, the world’s eye.

in the confines of his prison cell, Room is about a child and his mother (who was kidnapped and kept in a shed at the back of her kidnapper's house, where she bore his child) who has lived most of his life in a room, and to him, it is his whole world.

When he has to escape - he first refuses to believe, and then he's scared, terrified, and then,

he loves the world.

And he knows it is where he was always meant to be.

There I was alone, in the comforting dark of the cinema, crying my eyes out when Jack looks at the sky, and This will destroy you starts playing, and he gasps because the world exists. I was crying partly because it is a beautiful movie and a beautiful moment in the movie, but I was also crying because

Jack is like me, like you, like every person on earth. We're on this planet, this tiny planet in a non-descript galaxy in a universe which might not be the only universe - and we think it's our whole world. And when someone tells us there's another world out there, we refuse to believe, or we humour them and forget about it. But that other world is real and is out there and is so much better than anything we could imagine here.

We might not believe it. We might be afraid of it. But it's there.

And when we get round to believing, when we realise that there is nothing to be afraid of in a place where there will be no weeping, or pain, or fear, or injustice, then we will realise that that place answers all the calls and yearnings of our heart. And we will know that that is where we were always meant to be.

'I've been in the world 37 hours. I've seen pancakes, and a stairs, and birds, and windows, and hundreds of cars. And clouds, and police, and doctors, and grandma and grandpa [...] When I was small, I only knew small things. But now I'm five, I know EVERYTHING!'