Recent quotes:

Does Anyone Really Know You? | The New Yorker

The philosopher Stanley Cavell describes it beautifully in an essay about Frank Capra’s movie “It Happened One Night.” In the movie, an heiress named Ellie has fallen in love with Peter, a reporter, but hasn’t told him yet; she asks him if he’s ever fallen in love. (“Haven’t you ever thought about it at all? Seems to me you could make some girl wonderfully happy.”) He’s dreamed about meeting the right kind of girl, he says, and imagined taking her away to a beautiful tropical island, but “where you gonna find her? Somebody that’s real. Somebody that’s alive.” She’s right there in front of him, of course. “Why can he not allow the woman of his dreams to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The answer, he thinks, is that “to walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like “putting together night and day.” It’s scary.