I'm watching this film in pieces with my wife, Katherine (such is the norm in a family with a 7-month-old). Last night, we watched as T.E. Lawrence defied his Arab allies who claimed that the death-by-desertion (in the desert, no less) of a fellow Bedouin who fell off his camel was "written" in the heavens, so they felt no responsibility for going back to look for this one man who would surely die. If they did try, they reasoned, they would surely face the same fate. Lawrence decided to go back for this man who he barely knew--maybe to prove a point: when he returns victorious with the man he saved, he whispers out, "Nothing is written." Appeals to the humanist/rationalist side of me--in some quarters known as the flesh.
