I believe, and this is something I also learned from Alice Munro, that there's a moment where the personal becomes totally universal. When you see that person in their pathetic moment, that's the moment where the completely unifying sympathy with that person is possible - where you're no longer a person here and they're someone over there, and you can really feel like one, you can really feel like a human being. Or more like, you can really feel like flesh and blood, because I feel like that moment is the same thing with animals.
How to Dress WellBeing on the road, because you do so much waiting and so much traveling. It's not the same thing as being in the same city for a week or two weeks and then another city. It's really hard. I don't think people understand this about being a touring musician, or a touring actor, or somebody who flies everywhere for business. It's incredibly disorienting.
How to Dress WellSometimes I'll go out to say hi to people, and I'm just not ready for it. It feels too weird, too intense.
How to Dress WellI do think that we're pretty future-obsessed right now, and I think that capitalism works best when we have a very short memory of the past, when we can just go forward seamlessly into a future of ever-new products and ever-new experiences - even though they're exactly the same, just on a watch instead of on a phone or whatever.
How to Dress WellI think what's interesting about Alice Munro, too, is the extreme mundanity of things. And how even a life reduced to complete mundanity, like capitalism taking over rural Ontario or whatever, has complete sway over aspects of life. Nevertheless, people still have these moments of weird desperation, weird longing, weird true love, or weird, powerful lust, and that was a major inspiration for me, too.
How to Dress WellIn Dardenne brothers' films is a really small kind of humanity. It's not like the titanic "humanity" of humanism, it's much more gritty and realistic. But again, humanity is what unites all the people I'm talking about, and in such different ways. The humanity is in that moment you glimpse someone and have a completely intimate moment with them, and that intimacy is connected to an extreme pathetic aspect.
How to Dress WellI believe, and this is something I also learned from Alice Munro, that there's a moment where the personal becomes totally universal. When you see that person in their pathetic moment, that's the moment where the completely unifying sympathy with that person is possible - where you're no longer a person here and they're someone over there, and you can really feel like one, you can really feel like a human being. Or more like, you can really feel like flesh and blood, because I feel like that moment is the same thing with animals.
How to Dress Well