grandpa's peaches

But Lee is also layering in so much else — how a shared ethnic background can feel like affirmation in a way nothing else does, the resentment that festers between generations who don’t understand each other, the monotonous pursuit of money and power and how we equate it with finding meaning in our lives — that Beef feels bigger, unwieldier, and ultimately more thought-provoking than its first season.

He has learned, in the words of one of Bianco’s early novels, “the eternal paradox that only with love comes the strength to do without love.”

Out of the night that covers me,       Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be       For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance       I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance       My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears       Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years       Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate,       How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate,       I am the captain of my soul.

I have seen this movie a dozen times. And still — still! — the last line … wept! I think a lot about the scene where Dorothea (Annette Bening) sits silently as her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) reads her a passage from “It Hurts to be Alive and Obsolete: The Aging Woman,” an essay by Zoe Moss. “I am gregarious, interested in others, and I think intelligent. All I ask is to get to know people and to have them interested in knowing me. I doubt whether I would marry again and live that close to another individual. But I remain invisible,” Jamie reads. “I am supposed to fulfill my small functions and vanish.” There’s a pang of recognition on Dorothea’s face that turns to hurt and then dismissal. She wanted her son to see her — the movie begins when she asks two of the other women in their lives to help raise him into a sensitive, responsible man — but when he gets too close to her, she retreats. “You think you know me better ‘cause you read that?” she asks flatly. The son shakes his head, but his mother’s feelings are already hurt. He treated her like a thesis; she wasn’t interested in being known. “I don’t need to read a book to know about me,” she says simply, and the conversation ends there.