‘Beautiful world, where are you?’
A series by Zoé Komkommer
Words are excerpts from Sally Rooney's novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You?’
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I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life – difficult and sad – because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another – it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.
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Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?
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I still think of myself as someone who is interested in the experience of beauty, but I would never describe myself (except to you, in this email) as ‘interested in beauty’, because people would assume that I meant I was interested in cosmetics. This I guess is the dominant meaning of the word ‘beauty’ in our culture now. And it seems telling that this meaning of the word ‘beauty’ signifies something so profoundly ugly – plastic counters in expensive department stores, discount pharmacies, artificial perfumes, eyelash extensions, jars of ‘product’
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"The photo series by Zoé Komkommer reminded me of one of my favourite books ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You?’ by Sally Rooney. The characters in her analog images and the atmosphere blend with my memories of the characters in Sally Rooney’s novel. I felt so free to place some quotes from the book among the photos.
In September, Sally Rooney is releasing a new book, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!”
- This is a quote by myself :), Griet Depoorter (founder of Wolvis)
