Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn meticulously vacillated between audacity and piety, audacious on the first word, pious on the second, more audacious on the third, more pious still on the forth.

She made a career by playing the girl who searches a place in life: a place, not her place. The interest she portrayed reflected Molière's La grande ambition des femmes est d'inspirer de l'amour. Always did she observe the reactions to her advances with the liveliest keenness.

I can't help but think that she was a didactical tool of sorts, there to teach withholding subjects how to present themselves. She represents the idea that democracy and capitalism mean court life for everyone.

And that's not far from the truth, since democracy and capitalism mean moralising and double-dealing for everyone, yet it looks more desirable the way Audrey Hepburn portrayed it.

Young people! The problems they have. It's all there. Just a little effort. And on occasion a little sense as well.

As long as it is there...

There is no question that the whole world would have mistaken me for an indecisive dreamer when I was young, waiting for his life to fall into his lap, quite like Sabrina. In truth I wasn't expecting any such thing. Instead I was on an extended last sightseeing tour before my premature death. Only that my interest lay not with distraction, but with understanding, that I would at least know what it was that was going to kill me, quite like Florestan: Er sterbe! Doch er soll erst wissen, wer ihm sein stolzes Herz zerfleischt.

I must have lost my faith that information technology would overthrow the tyranny of the jealous around the time I was in the army. Although that faith still bore fruit and is still bearing fruit. But a new field to sustain another kind of society has not emerged. Too sharp is the contrast between the digital and the material. No emulsion is taking place, or at least none in the interest of humankind.

Ironically, Billy Wilder didn't believe one bit in the illusion, openly said so in One, Two, Three and even used Hepburn to veiledly mock it in Love in the Afternoon. Wilder saw it like it is, as a fall from respect, as the transition of the rule of respect to the rule of opportunity, to which Audrey Hepburn was nothing but a euphemistic footnote, although in the purity of her presentation of a timeless quality. That side of the court, the good side, didn't die in Hepburn's day, it died when the Catholic Church offered the world the new era described in Goethe's fairytale of the Green Snake and the beautiful Lily, thus freeing worldly authority from representing the heavenly, which hampered the French State at the time, as evidenced by France's loss of her North American colonies.

Interesting though that everything that matters can be tied to Audrey Hepburn. Well, in all that matters there's youth's concern for the quality of life, uninformed as it may be.