abhinaya

“If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“I am newly married to my husband when he remarks casually, “There are so many beautiful women in the world.” I freeze when he says this. I know it is a perfectly acceptable and truthful thing to remark on, and yet I feel a familiar twist in my gut. “What?” he asks. He can feel the switch; he can sense the instant tension in my body. “I don’t know,” I reply. I press my face into his chest, ashamed of my reaction. “I don’t know why it hurts to hear you say that.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“She was the model Manet painted more often than any other, more often than his own wife. But when I look at the paintings I don’t always recognize her as beautiful right away. Her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work, and maybe that’s what Manet found so fascinating about it – but then again maybe not. For six years Morisot came to his studio, chaperoned by her mother, and he painted her, always clothed. Several of her own paintings hang in the museum too. Two girls sharing a park bench in the Bois de Boulogne, one in a white dress, wearing a broad straw hat, bending her head forward over her lap, maybe she’s reading, the other girl in a dark dress, her long fair hair tied back with a black ribbon, showing to the viewer her white neck and ear. Behind them, all the lush vague greenery of the public park. But Morisot never painted Manet. Six years after she met him, and apparently at his suggestion, she married his brother. He painted her just once more, wedding ring glittering dark on her delicate hand, and then never again. Don’t you think that’s a love story?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I’ve gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other — the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light — that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted