“A person’s life doesn’t consist of just one story but of many, some of them consecutive and others overlapping. While one story is a comedy, another may be a melodrama, or a thriller. It’s important to recognize every incipient story’s genre and let the deep cinematic life develop the right state of mind to supersede the slow continuum.
“The holy cinematic trinity is beauty, hope and pain. A beautiful story has a beautiful beginning and a beautiful ending. The illusion of happiness makes the beginning beautiful, but the ending draws its beauty from pain.
“In order to live with cinematic depth, you must surrender completely to the story that has become true at a given moment, even if it demands morally dubious behaviour or, as some would call it, sinfulness. Morality is one of the lower orders of aesthetics, and is ultimately subordinate to beauty. Morality changes–today’s sin is tomorrow’s beautiful dream–but the aesthetic is eternal. Even cruelty, betrayal and ruthlessness can, in some situations, be aesthetically justified and even unavoidable choices, and categorically avoiding them can lead to slow continuum attachment and the death of life feeling.”
—Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s Secret Passages in a Hillside Town, a book unlike any I have read, including even Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society (the former translated by Lola Rogers, and the passage cited from p. 211 (Pushkin Press: 2017)
