I’m posting this here because Jeff Jensen’s e-mail isn’t working at EW.com and because, well, I’m too impatient to break it up into bits and post it at EW.com’s comments section.

Dear Jeff,

First off, you’ve got a fine name.  Second, I’ve been a LOST addict from the early parts of the second season and I’ve been reading your commentary the whole time.  I’m just about the biggest LOST fan that exists in the universe (I’m sure there are many such people) and a good amount of my time here in graduate school (I’m doing a PhD in sociology at Yale) is spent reading LOST commentary, checking out the blogs, and feeling both guilty and giddy about various and sundry spoilers.  My favorite thing to read each week, though, is your commentary–often it’s as much fun as the episode itself.  I love your mix of highbrow and lowbrow, the breezy writing style, and the unpretentious love of all sorts of knowledge.  You’re the kind of guy who can quote Gravity’s Rainbow and not make it look pretentious, and let me tell you: being in graduate school, you come to really appreciate folks like that.  I’m also a huge fan of Totally Lost: if any editor tells you to cancel it, let them know that they would make a certain graduate student weep pathetically.  I’m not really sure that would help your case, but it’s kind of like when your wimpy little brother says he’ll help you in a bar fight: totally useless but nice to know.

Anyways, I have a few LOST theories/question I wanted to share with you:

1. Waiting until Season 5 just about killed me.  I’m increasingly aware that eventually LOST will, in fact, end.  We fans need to begin planning how we will deal with such a colossal loss.  My suggestion is either finding the island or joining a doomsday cult.  I’m aware there might be other options.

2. Your nod towards zero point is fascinating, and I think it actually ties into a lot more religious stuff than you’re acknowledging.  In his recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor talks about the difference between sacred time and secular time: the idea is that sacred time is all about communal experience and the eternal present, while secular time is about one moment leading into another.  A good example of this is Easter: Christians believe that every Easter is in some way in touch with a cosmic truth in a way that no other day is–in this way, each Easter has more in common with every other Easter than it does with the days before and after it.  You can also get this experience at a U2 concert, or any meaningful communal experience: it feels much more like the other intense experiences you’ve had than like the mundane experiences right before or right after it.  So what if the left-behinders are in a kind of sacred time, a moment that is above and beyond the mundane world?  In fact, it seems as though the island itself is a part of this sacred time, and that would explain why those who are really from the island (like Richard Alpert etc) don’t move with the Left-Behinders: they are a part of the timeless sacred.  However, those who are from the “regular world” can’t quite ride correctly with the “jump” the island took.  The sacred island changed its position in the secular world, which doesn’t really matter to the sacred all that much (the divine is still the divine wherever it goes) but it would make the non-divine living on the island a bit confused and messed up.

3. So the show really doesn’t want to look at the Grandfather paradox of time travel: (I think of Robert Heinein’s short story By His Bootstraps about this especially).  That only makes sense of we think of time not as a necessarily logical place where every action has a logical reaction, but rather the result of a linear narrative.  This can be kind of justified with quantum mechanics (at least the rule breaking can) but I’m not sure the time-has-a-purpose-and-meaning-and-direction can be justified by quantums, which, if anything, make the world look even more meaningless.  What matters about LOST, though, is this cosmic sense of purpose: if history does have a purpose (and is not just one damn thing after another) than it is actually a dimension with a clear end (like distance or length) and so it is entirely known already.  This also fits with a lot of theology and ties in with the idea of sacred time.  So if time has an endpoint that we’re all going to get to, then it really doesn’t matter if people go back in time and affect people in the past–if they do so, the end-point of history is still the same.

4. The problem with this view of history–the idea of course-correcting–is that it runs the risk of totally limiting agency.  If there will be course correction, why the worry about saving the world?  I’m not sure about this.  After all, part of the attraction to the sacred is that it’s pretty tough.  However, there have been moments when the sacred came down and needed humans–Jung wrote all about this.  If that’s the case–if this is one of those moments–then suddenly the sacred has come to Earth and needs real help to reach an endpoint for which it either cannot or has chosen not to be able to correct.

Just random thoughts.  Again, I’m a huge fan.  I’d love to hear back from you but I know you’re extremely busy.  Keep up the good work!

Jeff