(no subject)

I just spent three hours looking at portraits on Flickr. This guy's stuff in particular is just incredible. I was reminded of the sequence in Koyaanisqatsi where the camera slowly zooms in on a stationary person in the street; some of them are looking at the camera, which is presumably either behind a one-way mirror or otherwise concealed off in the distance. It's probably my favourite part of the movie, though I'm always surprised when I remember it; I feel like it's somehow at odds with the rest of the movie, a casual defeat of its central thesis, because it turns out that people are still there, after all. Still totally and completely there, despite all the machines and all the time-lapse and all the hotdogs. There's an old man shaving; this pimpin' black guy checking out a passing girl; a posed group of Las Vegas waitresses. Most of them look so tired, and kind of lost; bewildered. Beautiful.

Even though I feel sometimes that I have given up on the better part of myself, that I am slowly forgetting what it is to do human things, that eventually I will lose the ability to be in love, I guess it's not so after all. I can still go sit on a bus, or a bench, or some Internet site, and watch people -- and eventually, inevitably I am recovering. People can't help it -- even the ones that hide in their rooms and put things off, that don't talk to anyone, that just try day after day to somehow sit it out. Watch them for long enough, or sometimes all at once -- they're beautiful.