The Pretty People Project #5: Nothing so sweet as two people headed somewhere late at night, each making use of the other’s shoulder.
I met the man in the park who makes the bubbles. He’s the happiest man in the city. The measure of a good bubble, he says, falls on three scales:
1) Size of the bubble
2) Duration for which the bubble survives before bursting
3) Distance over which the bubble travels during its life
No moment is sweeter, says the man, his eyes glinting like a scary-funny jack-o’-lantern, than when a bubble big as a car slips off the ropes, and like a dazed cautious spirit drifts out over the lawn, all the colors a-swirl in its skin.
The man shows me his bubble-journals where he’s been charting the success of his bubbles. His biggest achievement thus far was a juggernaut that lifted on a light breeze last spring and traveled for nearly two minutes across the lawn before twisting apart in a gust of wind. If he’s in the mood to explain his bubbles, the man in the park names them after celebrities. An Elvis Presley or a Marilyn Monroe is an extremely iridescent bubble with a circumference rivaling a redwood, but survives for only a few moments, magically holding everyone’s gaze before blinking into a string of spit that hangs against the sunset.
From Hanna and her Sisters - Woody Allen’s thoughts on God and Atheism
You travel to a place because you have this picture of it and you want to couple with the whole country. Then you find that you and its natives haven’t a thing in common. You don’t understand the basic signals which you’d always assumed all humanity shared. You decide it was all a mistake, that it was all in your head. Then you dig a bit deeper and you find that, despite your reasonable suspicions, you still desire them all, but you don’t know what it is exactly you want from them, or what they seem to want from you, because they too, it turns out, are looking at you with what could only be one thing on their mind. But you tell yourself you’re imagining things. And you’re ready to pack up and go back to Rome because all of these touch and go signals are driving you mad. But then something suddenly clicks, like a secret underground passageway, and you realize that, just like you, they are desperate and aching for you as well, and the worst thing is that, with all your experience and your sense of irony and your ability to overcome shyness wherever it threatens to crop up, you feel totally stranded. I didn’t know their language, didn’t know the language of their hearts, didn’t even know my own. I saw veils everywhere: what I wanted, what I didn’t know I wanted, what I didn’t want to know I wanted, what I’d always known I wanted. This is either a miracle. Or it is hell.
Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I’d been in my life—and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more that to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.
Andre Aciman - CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
