I think that the ruby glass in typical Herzogian fashion can be read as a kind of metaphor for, you know, the unknowable.

It symbolizes for me a time before people thought that the universe or the natural order could be rationally understood, could be uncovered, could be, you know, exposed through inductive science and reason.

It symbolizes a time before

human beings had learned to master nature and kind of manipulate it for their own ends. I think

in another plausible reading, it also symbolizes the decline, tragic decline in a way of a kind

of craft society where objects really are unique, a time before, you know,

industrialization standardizes everything and mass produces things. I'm not saying that Herzog

literally had all of these things in mind in making the film, but that's what it means for me as a,

as a fable or an allegory. All of Hyas' monologues seem to gesture at this kind of chaos and

disintegration that follows from, you know, the world being disenchanted. It is in many ways a

fable about, you know, as you put it before, you know, what happens if you walk through, you know,

this door that Herzog is so averse to walking through. And sometime, you know,

in the last few hundred years, our entire civilization did a version of that. And I don't know,

I've never considered myself, you know, I'm not like an ardent traditionalist or anything like that,

but I've long been attracted to the idea, kind of romanticist idea, that whether you see value

in, you know, modernity or not, there is some

kind of tragedy that's contained within that process. You know, something and perhaps something

valuable, or at least particular type of coherence that may have once existed, is lost and can

never be retrieved. One last thing I'd like to bring up about this movie is a couple months ago,

I watched Herzog's remake of Nosferatu from 1979 for the first time in many years.

And that movie lingers much more than F.W. Murnau's original film did on the breakdown of society

after the vampire comes to town and the plague is spread.

...