as two years at a time

On the U.S. side, Bilbao is referring to the Obama

Administration’s policy of permitting unlimited travel to

Cuba by Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island. But

this week’s Cuba change is arguably more momentous, given

how long Cubans have chafed under their government’s

expensive and despised exit-visa constraints—which have

forced so many of them to make perilous raft journeys across

the Florida Straits. Raúl Castro, considered more pragmatic

than his firebrand sibling, had been flirting with abolishing

the exit visa for years as part of a reform program that last

year let Cubans begin buying and selling private property

like cars and homes. Now, starting Jan. 14, according to the

immigration reform published Tuesday in Granma, the communist

party newspaper, Cubans can freely travel abroad for as long

as two years at a time.

There are of course strings if not ropes attached—no Cuban

reform is ever without them. Valuable professionals like

doctors are likely to be exempted, to keep the

“interventionist and subversive” U.S. from “robbing

[Cuban] talent,” according to Granma; and so most likely are

dissidents. But the regime, which is being forced by economic

crisis to lay off as many as a million state workers, may be

hoping the reform will relieve some of that pressure as more

Cubans not only travel but find employment outside the island

and increase the level of remittances Cuba receives from

abroad. Washington, meanwhile, will not only have to prepare

for an onslaught of visitor visa applications in Cuba, it may

have to reconsider its controversial “wet foot-dry foot”

policy that grants residency and a track to citizenship for

Cubans who make it onto U.S. soil.

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Some of us have long believed that

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But amazingly enough, the process succeeded. "Even more, a mysterious extra meaning [was] gained from the juxtaposition of two images which was not present in either of the shots themselves. ... In short, we discovered that the human mind was predisposed to cinematic grammar as if it were an entirely natural, inborn language." Perhaps it is inborn, he says, because we spend one-third of our lives "in the nightly world of dreams. There, images are fragmented and different realities collide abruptly with what seems ... to have great meaning." So he sees film editing as, probably unknowingly, employing the power and means of dream.
This percept is like a flash of lightning that lasts. Murch concludes that for many millions of years, human beings were carrying within them the ability to respond to film and were unconsciously awaiting its arrival in order to employ their dream-faculty more fully. Some of us have long believed that, through more recent centuries, theater artists and audiences have been longing for the film to be invented even without a clue that there could be such a medium. Many tricks of stagecraft in those centuries were, without knowing it, attempting to be cross-cuts and double images. Some dramatists imagined their work in forms and perspectives that anticipated film (most notably and excitingly, Büchner's Danton's Death).
Now Murch tells us that these theater attempts at prognostication a few centuries earlier are puny stuff: for millions of years, homo sapiens has been unwittingly prepared for the intricacies of film, has indeed been preparing for them every night. Murch proposes with stirring insight that the last century, the mere one hundred years of film's existence, has been, for one human faculty, the emotional and psychological goal of the ages.

Accounting

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That history animates what might otherwise seem a morbidly inanimate subject, and Faust organizes her account around what she calls the "work of death." Fittingly, her chapter titles--gerunds all--remind us that human beings are active participants in death rather than passive victims of it: "Dying," "Killing," "Burying," "Naming," "Realizing," "Believing and Doubting," "Accounting," "Numbering," "Surviving." And in the Civil War, the "work" proved to be as destabilizing as it was massive.
To be sure, Americans of the antebellum decades were no strangers to death's ubiquity. Urbanization had increased mortality and morbidity and decreased life expectancy, especially in the Northeast. But having been reared in Christian traditions (the great majority were, at this point, Protestant), they also understood death as a social and spiritual process, as a reckoning and a transition, and so had been tutored in an idea of the "Good Death." Theologically rooted in what was known as the ars moriendi, or "the arts of dying," which provided rules of conduct (how to surrender one's soul, and resist the devil's temptations, and identify with Christ, and pray) since at least the fifteenth century, the "Good Death" would later find expression in sermons, religious tracts, and popular literature (Dickens, Thackeray, Stowe). By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become a feature of middle-class cultural practice more broadly, in which witness-bearing by family members proved central. After all, most Americans, especially middle- and upper-class Americans, died at home.