Beautiful women on a screen

I can’t take beautiful women on a screen. It hurts me. Trying to explain why, I recall an old friend describing “a sunset so beautiful you could weep.” There’s a sadness in beholding beauty.

Of course, the beauty of women and the beauty of sunsets were very different. A sunset is huge; it envelops you. And it has no fear of being leered at.

But project Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman or Setsuko Hara onto an enormous screen, and they cease to be women. They become an experience of beauty, as enveloping and inviting as the sunset.

It’s more than I can stand. It’s a kind of torture, to be swept up into this beauty, and to know I can’t keep it. Nor can I become it, which is really what I want, though I don’t understand what I mean.

Alan Arkin asked Madeline Khan if she always wanted to be a musician. She pondered, then answered: “I wanted to be the music.”