But when, on a rare visit to another quarter, he is issued a mysterious invitation to a night club, where he seems to return to his pre-division life, his faith in the absolute categorization of personality is shaken.
Which is why -- in order to pull the political center back into a less reactionary location -- it is absolutely vital that progressives stop fretting about which particular presidential candidate they should actively endorse, and instead begin to talk openly again about the pernicious impact of class divisions on life in America, regardless of who occupies the White House.
In Chaucer's case, the division between life and art is especially glaring: 494 different "records" of his life survive, including matters such as courtly and civic posts he held, awards he received, and at least one place he lived … but not one of them mentions that he was a poet.
Any division of life into personal and political halves is absent.
In the elemental drama of cell division, all life is revealed as one.
Despite meagre pension provision seeing many forced to work beyond state retirement age, many pensionable workers balk at the "crude" division of life into work and retirement.
Plus, says Nora Marshall, acting chief of the N.T.S.B.'s survival factors division: "The life vests we have now are the same ones we had in the 1940's.
It's also a film in which the division between life and art is elided, as it must be in the directors' own world.
"The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals," he writes, by way of arguing that human beings are bound to care about this division.
It's the kind of macabre joke, or a grim jeu d'esprit that Calle specializes in, shattering the comfortable division between life and art, real and unreal — all in search of the transposable nugget of experience.
The climactic scene, in which the husband and wife unwittingly overhear a murder while having sex, memorably dramatises the idea that the division between life and death is at all times thinner and more fragile than we willingly admit.
