Two nights before she left, she tells me, she had a terrible premonition – her daughter seemed to appear before her.
Although at first he appears to have bucked Renton's premonitions, Begbie's salvation quickly starts to come unstuck – first when his California family is threatened, and then when he learns that his younger son, Sean, has been murdered in Edinburgh.
For example, quantum entanglement between individuals could account for a range of so-called paranormal effects such as telepathy, and (because quantum physics allows what appears to be backward time effects) premonitions, or precognition -- information from the future.
Animals, embodying human weaknesses, social tension, tragedy, the premonition of death, or some other insidious danger, appear repeatedly on a stage of constant hostility and conflict.
Those who have been paying attention will remember that, in episode three, Ray's father appeared to him in a dream and warned of a premonition that he had of Ray running through the trees and being shot "to pieces".
They offer a permanent premonition of winter; even the interior portraits suffer their own particular solstice, as the creeping invasion of shadow appears not so much to stripe and hatch the central figures as to suck them in.
It is possible to read Cosmopolis as a premonition of the economic crash we now know all about, but really it looks like an exercise in zeitgeist-connoisseurship that appears obtuse, self-indulgent and fatally shallow.
Then comes the ironic bucolic energy of the scherzo, and the Arcadian vision of the slow movement, Beethoven's most opulently lyrical music, an idyll that dreams of a new kind of heroism towards the end of its rapturous pastoral, as those brass fanfares suddenly appear amid harmonic premonitions of the most visionary music of the finale.
The premonition was correct.
