Distance is the soul of beauty.

This sentence of Simone Weil expresses an old truth: only through distance, in space or in time, does reality under go purification. Our immediate concerns which were blinding us to the grace of ordinary things disappear and a look backward reveals them in their every minutest detail. Distance engendered by the passing of time is at the core of the oeuvre of Marcel Proust. Distance in space and awareness that borders with their barbed wire separated him from his country allowed a young Lithuanian to write his Idylls.

Jonas Mekas