I have been perusing Austin Kleon’s newsletter again today and came across his wonderful summary of the book “100 Essays I don’t have the time to write” by Sarah Ruhl. I loved every single bit he pulled out from her book but these two were my favorite observations from the author:
“A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”
Sarah Ruhl on Italo Calvino’s essay on “Lightness” in Six Memos For The New Millennium
And this little bit from Sarah as well on children:
“Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it meant to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?”
