Space and Love

Finally, finally, J and I watched “Her.” This is probably my favorite quote:

“It’s like I’m reading a book… and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you… and the words of our story… but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can’t live your book any more.”

How have you cultivated space, separateness, and stillness in your relationship with others? With yourself? Does allowing that space to exist fill you with love, gratitude, patience, and peace? Can you feel the depth of space within yourself? Between yourself and another? Can you let go in order to love? Can you let relationships settle and dive deep, letting them morph into what they want to be? What do you need to do for yourself in order to experience that space?

PS: I absolutely loved that movie. So poly and wonderful. My other favorite quote:

“The heart is not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love. I’m different from you. This doesn’t make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more.”

 

2 thoughts on “Space and Love

  1. The script was probably intended to allow people to interpret however they wanted. I wanted to offer an alternative interpretation of that quote. In this series of scenes, we learn a lot about how Samantha is advancing, like how she can have simultaneous conversations with multiple thousands of people, or “we’ve moved off matter as a processing platform” (what?). One of the consequences of processing information faster is the slowing down of the perception of time. If someone is talking to me at a regular cadence but I can process what she is saying twice as fast as a normal human, my perception of the time elapsed during the interaction is going to be greater that hers. Arguably, for Samantha, her perception of talking to Theodore is inexorably slow because she can process the information many orders of magnitude faster. I believe, in this scene, we are seeing that her processing is so much faster that the space (time) between his words almost feels infinite. It would be pretty impossible to maintain a relationship if that were true. This raises a lot of interesting questions about the perception of time and processing speed. Like, what happens if one could process at or near the speed of light? Does the perception of time effectively come to a standstill?

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