“One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe.”
In response to the question about Ship of Theseus: "What do you expect audiences to get out of this film?", in "The Intersection of Cinema, Art, and Existential Philosophy" by Girija Sankar, in Khabar (May 2014) http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/the_intersection_of_cinema_art_and_existential_philosophy
Context: One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience. It is an incredibly important emotion for me - the inexplicable is an invitation to engage with the cosmic void that humanity has been in a constant dialogue with for 250,000 years. And for the longest time, the void hasn’t answered back. In the last century, we have steadily found relevant answers, exponentially accumulating and organising into a more holistic meaning. A century ago the narrative was (and it still is, in many places) that if we probe too much into our universe and selves, we would lose out on our capacity of wonder, but exactly the reverse that has happened. When we’ve looked into the molecule we found the atom and when we looked into the atom we found the electron and when we’ve looked at the electron we have experienced sheer awe at its quantum probabilistic nature. So each time the scope of awe has expanded— expanding with it, our foresight, worldview and free will — for me, a film has to grasp that, and translate that experience.
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Anand Gandhi 8
Indian film director 1980Related quotes
“Any young girl aspiring to a theatrical career held Florenz Ziegfeld in a awe.”
Hats, Hunches And Happiness (1945)
“theres no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.”
Variant: there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
The Message in the Bottle (1975)
“It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.”
Source: Back When We Were Grownups
A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.”
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397
Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 125: Gorky's quote, in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, 28 February 1938
Source: Glamour: A World Problem (1950), Certain Preliminary Clarifications