A Ship, a Writer, and a Crossing
One of the most insightful films I have seen recently is not overtly religious, political, or philosophical. In fact, very little seems to happen in it at all.
Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk follows Alice Hughes, a celebrated novelist traveling across the Atlantic to receive a prestigious literary award. Accompanying her are two old friends, Roberta and Susan, along with her nephew Tyler. Most of the film consists of conversations. We hear old memories, old grievances, literary discussions, and unresolved tensions that slowly emerge during the voyage.
At one point, after they have finally arrived in England, Alice insists that the voyage is not a cruise but a crossing. The distinction is easy to miss, but it gives the film much of its symbolic force. A cruise is circular and recreational; it is movement without a real destination. A crossing, by contrast, has direction. It is ordered toward arrival. It suggests passage, transition, even pilgrimage.
Yet this is precisely the tragedy of the film. The ship is moving, but the souls aboard are largely not. They cross the Atlantic, but they do not cross the deeper distance that separates memory from reconciliation, speech from communion, and self-reference from love.
Human Life as a Crossing: Aquinas and Finality
The more I reflected on the film, the more I realized that this distinction between a cruise and a crossing reaches beyond the ship itself. Human life is a crossing. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches at the beginning of his famous “Treatise on Happiness,” every human action is ordered toward an end (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 1). We are not static beings. We are always moving because life itself bears within it an interior principle of motion. To live is not merely to be carried along from without, but to act from within. In the human person, this interior dynamism becomes desire, choice, fear, ambition, love, and even sin. Even when we do not know where we are going, our actions reveal that we are seeking some perceived good.
For Aquinas, this is not accidental. The human person does not simply choose isolated goods in a random sequence. Our actions are ordered within a hierarchy of ends. One thing is chosen for the sake of another, and that for the sake of another, until the will finally rests in what is sought for its own sake. As Aquinas writes, “that which is first in the order of intention is the principle, as it were, moving the appetite” (ST I-II, q. 1, a. 4). In other words, what we ultimately love moves everything else. The final end is not merely one more goal among others. It is the hidden principle that gives direction to all our movement.
This is why the question of direction matters so much. Human beings cannot avoid desiring happiness. Aquinas insists that all men agree in desiring the last end, because all desire the fulfillment of their appetite, but they disagree about where this happiness is actually found (ST I-II, q. 1, a. 7). Some seek it in honor, others in wealth, others in pleasure, reputation, power, knowledge, artistic achievement, or human affection. The formal structure is the same—everyone desires happiness—but the concrete object chosen as happiness differs.
This distinction helps illuminate the film. The characters are not without desire. They are full of desire: for recognition, vindication, literary immortality, money, affection, reconciliation, or control over the narrative of their own lives. But their desires circle because they lack a true final horizon. They seek partial goods as though these could finally satisfy the whole human person.
Aquinas is mercilessly clear on this point. No created good can finally quiet the human will. “Happiness is the perfect good, which satisfies the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired,” he writes. Therefore, “nothing can lull man’s will save the universal good,” which is found “not in any creature, but in God alone” (ST I-II, q. 2, a. 8). This is one of the deepest reasons why the film is so sad. Its characters possess many real goods: intelligence, friendship, memory, culture, literary achievement, even the beauty of travel. Yet these goods cannot bear the weight of final happiness. They are good, but they are not God.
Aquinas also helps us understand why the crossing is not yet complete. In this life, we are viatores, wayfarers. We are on the way, not yet at rest. We desire happiness, but we do not yet possess beatitude in its fullness. The blessed, the beati, have arrived at the end for which the human person was made: the vision of God. Aquinas teaches that man’s final and perfect happiness cannot consist in any created good, nor even in the highest exercise of natural contemplation alone, but only in the vision of the divine essence (ST I-II, q. 3, a. 8). The human intellect is ordered to truth without limit, and the human will is ordered to the good without limit. Only God, who is Truth itself and Goodness itself, can fulfill these powers completely.
This is not something man can seize by his own natural powers. Aquinas is explicit: “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence,” and this vision exceeds the capacity of every created nature. Therefore, man cannot attain perfect beatitude by his natural powers alone; he must be elevated by divine grace (ST I-II, q. 5, a. 5). This is decisive. The human crossing does not reach its final shore by technique, talent, conversation, therapy, travel, literary success, or even natural virtue alone. These may be genuine goods, but they are not the final harbor. The crossing reaches its end only when grace brings the human person into communion with God.
Movement Without Arrival
Here lies one of the tragedies of modernity. It is not that we have lost movement. On the contrary, we are almost exhausted by movement. We travel constantly, communicate constantly, produce constantly, consume constantly, and revise ourselves constantly. Our days are filled with motion. But movement without a final end easily becomes agitation. Communication without communion becomes noise. Productivity without beatitude becomes distraction. We move more than ever, but often with less sense of where we are going.
The question, then, is not whether we are moving. The question is whether we are moving toward the true good. A cruise can be filled with motion and still go nowhere. A crossing is different. It is ordered toward arrival. Human life becomes a true crossing only when it is ordered toward the One in whom alone the restless will can finally rest.
The Doctor, the Pool, and the Odyssey
This symbolism appears again in the quiet figure of Alice’s doctor. We discover almost indirectly that he is her physician. While Alice moves aimlessly through the ship, even swimming repetitive laps in the pool, he is slowly reading Homer’s Odyssey. The contrast is subtle but important. Alice’s movement is circular and repetitive: motion without arrival, conversation without conversion, memory without reconciliation. The Odyssey, by contrast, is the great poem of return. It belongs to the foundational imagination of Hellenic civilization and tells of a journey ordered toward home.
The detail matters because it reminds us that not all movement is the same. One can travel endlessly and still remain enclosed within oneself. A true crossing requires direction. It requires the possibility of return, recognition, and homecoming.
From Circular Time to the Fullness of Time
This also opens onto a deeper civilizational contrast. The ancient pagan imagination often experienced time as circular: the cycle of seasons, birth and death, rise and fall, departure and return. Even the Odyssey, for all its grandeur, is a poem of nostos, of return to the home from which one departed. It is not yet the Christian drama of creation, fall, redemption, and final consummation. It is not yet history moving from Alpha to Omega.
Christianity does not abolish memory or return, but it transforms time. In Christ, time becomes linear without becoming meaningless. History is no longer mere recurrence; it is pilgrimage. It has a beginning, a center, and an end: creation, Incarnation, and consummation. As St. Paul writes, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4). In Christ, time is not merely repeated; it is fulfilled.
Nietzsche and the Eternal Return
Nietzsche understood this with extraordinary clarity, though from the opposite side. His doctrine of eternal recurrence is one of the great anti-Christian visions of time. In The Gay Science, he imagines a demon announcing: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” Nothing new will come; every joy, pain, thought, sigh, and event will return “in the same succession and sequence” (The Gay Science, §341, “The Greatest Weight”). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the same vision appears in the image of the wheel: “Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of being” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, “The Convalescent,” §2). Against the Christian movement from creation to consummation, Nietzsche imagines existence as recurrence without final redemption.
In that sense, the difference between cruise and crossing becomes more than a narrative detail. It becomes a metaphysical symbol. A cruise belongs to circular time; a crossing belongs to hope.
Everyone Talks, but No One Communes
At first glance, the film appears to be a meditation on aging, friendship, and literature. Yet beneath the surface lies a profound diagnosis of a distinctly modern loneliness. The irony is hidden in the title itself. Everyone talks. Almost nobody communicates. Or more precisely, everyone communicates, but no one truly enters into communion.
The distinction matters. Our age has achieved unprecedented communication. We can instantly exchange messages, photographs, opinions, reactions, and information with people across the world. Yet many people experience a loneliness that previous generations would scarcely have understood. We are surrounded by signals while remaining essentially unknown.
The film captures this condition with remarkable precision. The characters spend hours speaking with one another, yet their conversations continually circle back to themselves, to their careers, to their wounds, to their disappointments, to their narratives. One of the most revealing moments comes when Susan frustratingly remarks that she has never been around such self-referential people.
That observation is not merely a criticism of a few eccentric intellectuals. It is a diagnosis of modern culture itself. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel distinguishes Christian hope and communion from the isolation that characterizes much modern thought. Against existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who often portray human existence as fundamentally solitary and conflictual, Marcel insists that authentic human fulfillment arises through presence, fidelity, and availability to others.
Photo by Christian Lambert on Unsplash
