Definition - Depaysement

Definition - Depaysement


People do some out-of-character things in foreign countries. They strike up conversations with strangers in bars, even if they would never do the same back home. They wear unflattering hats. There’s something about being a stranger in a strange land that’s equal parts exhilarating and disorienting, and this messy mix of feelings is what the French word depaysement — literally, decountrification, or being without a country — means to capture. It’s “the feeling of being an outsider,” and though getting lost because you can’t quite read the street signs as well as you maybe thought you could can be unsettling, the feeling of being somewhere else just as often “swirls us up into a kind of giddiness, only ever felt when far away from home.”

Quotes - Hayao Miyazaki - On Romance

Quotes - Hayao Miyazaki - On Romance

“I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live– if I’ m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.”

- Hayao Miyazaki

Connection - Subway Girl

Connection - Subway Girl

I stand with eyes closed, and the ripple play of a violin etches its way through my body.  I can feel rhythms from the top of my head down through to the soles of my feet.  Again, again.  Rhythmic and motion, a push and pull.  The casual grip of fingers through touch-less gloves as the ebb and twist of the subway cars bounce me like a bow string, legs bend and straighten, and my weight drifts on the flowing river of steel.  I am no longer he who is remembered, but a force of nature.

My mind slips away.