Sarah Ruhl...on Theater and Eating What We See

“In the medieval age stained glass was one of the few daily images offered up for reflection and meditation, and now in the present moment we see God knows how many visual images a day—I think by one recent estimate the eye had to process three thousand visual images a day (and just think if one’s job requires one to walk by Times Square now and again, the horror). If the Victorians lived in an age of the word making the image, we now live in the digital age: touch makes image.... Recently I was with my five year-old daughter at the theater. She whispered and pointed to the stage “Are those real people?” She asked me. “They’re actors,” I said. “But are they real people?” She asked. “Yes, I said.”

I realized that she must have asked this because of the profusion of digital images that she sees. She didn’t wonder if the characters were real, she wondered if the actors were real. This is perhaps why the new generation will find theater exceedingly exciting (or else exceedingly dull)—a place where word still conjures images of the invisible world but the people are real.”
— From "Eating what we see" (100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write)


currently considering "l'eternel feminin..."

Renoir’s preferred subjects were adolescent girls, whom he idealized as perfectly epitomizing female beauty. He wrote, “In literature as in painting, talent is shown only through treatment of the female figurine.”

Here. “The Sculptor in His Studio.” Behind his head a woman wiggles in front of a window above a city, her hands covering up or playing at the place between her legs. Maybe both. The sculptor looks out from the canvas with black hole eyes, holding a tiny replica of the woman in his hands. His tiny, tiny woman. He made this tiny tiny, this subtle symmetry. He made such perfect beauty from whatever he had to work with.

She wasn’t much, but she gave him that.