So, I’ve watched all seasons of Sex and the City. It was a particularly boring summer, and I really wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Now it’s nothing great, but even so, if one looks for it, if one is attentive enough, there are moments of poetry, of epiphany, of revelation in almost everything in the world. Simone Weil says that rather than saying the landscape is ugly, it’s better to say that one is suffering.
In one of the later episodes, Carrie Bradshaw is dating a famous Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky. She soon resumes smoking, and on the streets of a foreign city, on a particularly cold grey day, Petrovsky says how beautiful she looks with a cigarette, how desirable. Carrie smiles, but as he starts walking away from her, she suddenly calls out to him and says : it’s killing me.
Petrovsky laughs. Carrie laughs.
I forget what happens after.
Beyond Six Rivers 