Perfection Vincenzo Latronico Quotes

Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating

They all spent their lives in plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

Their comments on the issues of the day would be commented on by their friends, to whom Anna and Tom would then email links to thinkpieces arguing the opposite. Five minutes later, those friends would come back with a new thread. They also worked with the windows open. The storms also blew into their apartments.

They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. This was a deduction.

Their intellectual hori­zon was therefore largely formed from headlines in the Guardian or the New York Times, which happened to be the same newspapers their Greek, Dutch and Belgian friends read. In their world, Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.

The reason they had tolerated, even loved the work, they will tell themselves, is because the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to the limitless growth and broad horizons of the rest of their days.

They will make time to take some photos for Instagram, but will struggle to crack a smile as they think about all the work still to be done. They will drop barbed remarks about the weekend’s hitches, without proposing any solutions. They will drink at lunchtime, doze off in the sun, and wake up feeling foggy and sluggish, with a pounding head and too much to do. But then they will receive notifications of the first reviews, and all that weight will instantly lift. Three will have come in, all of them giving five stars. One will be by a woman with over three hundred thousand followers, who will have tagged them in a post praising, as per their agreement, the relaxed but impeccable welcome, the choice of natural wines, the simple, elegant decor—Mediterranean and yet unmistakably international. It’s all completely perfect, the story will say. It’s just like it is in the pictures.

Of course, just as the visual points of difference they sold to their clients were also sold to thousands of others by creative professionals all over the western world, an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation. And yet this knowledge registered only in the vaguest sense.

They would imagine how they must look to the outside world with their aching cheekbones drawn into fixed grins, their clothes smeared with cigarette ash and sweat, and still carrying the odd trace of dimly remembered adventures: a marker pen scribble on their face; a garland of fake frangipani in their pocket; a bunch of helium balloons tied to their jacket buttons and now trailing, half-deflated, like comet tails. They would feel decadent and enviable, alive.

Walking their usual routes, they would invariably notice the changes. The old Croatian lady’s Spätkauf was now a “cake boutique” with a teal-blue shop sign and an Instagram handle written on a blackboard. The cultural center where the old Greeks used to play cards was now the flagship store of a Japanese trainer brand. Immense shop windows revealed row after row of indistinguishable offices with a faintly hip feel—design or architecture studios, coworking spaces, start-ups, all with Modulor tables and minimalist Helvetica Neue stencils. Walking past the Art Nouveau apartment blocks off Mehringdamm or the futuristic sixties high-rise tower blocks around Kottbusser Tor, Anna and Tom would note the growing number of windows with the lights off at night, a likely sign that they were short-term rentals, which meant more speculation.

Non sempre la realtà era fedele alle immagini.

An egg became more famous than the pope. A highly contagious virus raged through West Africa. A billionaire poured a bucket of ice on his head. A fashion brand exploited East Asian sweatshop workers. A young woman recorded all the times she was catcalled. Two African Americans were killed by the police. A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared.

On their screens – everywhere, all the time – acquain­tances and old schoolmates and strangers from around the world would share all that was beautiful in their lives. The images followed no logical thread beyond their own splendour: vintage clothes and filtered selfies, snow-covered forests, crystalline coastlines, bright, airy apartments, book covers, cupcakes, flowers, wild ani­mals, galaxies, contemporary art shows, feet. Anna and Tom would be captivated. Their interest in plants – a hobby that had never occurred to them when they were students – was likely a result of the never-ending stream of pictures they were fed of stunning plants in bay win­dows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet. The bright green tropical leaves and the purplish-white dots on the begonias would parade across photo grids as evidence of a rarefied, curated life. Anna and Tom didn’t notice the change until after it had happened. Plants ap­peared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill.

It hadn’t always been this way. Something must have changed for them somewhere. They just couldn’t work out what. They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update – the intro­duction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between those minutiae and the way in which social me­dia had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire.