vertigo expanded

In this quote, Solnit imagines the untold story of Midge, the friend of Scotty in Hitchcock's Vertigo played by Barbara Bel Geddes, and places her in a different realm from those other characters in the film, gives her the sensual pleasures of living in the present, and above all, a love of gravity.

"As for nature, I am in love with the elemental forces, with fire and water, with gravity, and evaporation and the properties of light, and there's as much of that in the city. It's in the way cream curls down into ice coffee and cigarette smoke coils up and the ice cubes in this drink are melting. I remember swinging in the backyard when I was a girl and scaring Johnny who lived next door and was just enough older to think he could supervise me, jumping off the crest of the arc and coming down with my skirt billowing like a parachute. She seemed to take pleasure in everything, to have a diffuse sensuality spread throughout the tangible world, in marked contrast to the protagonists chasing a conventional notion of satisfaction forever postponed. And so I gave her gravity, that sensation children pursue relentlessly, again and again, swinging, spinning,..."

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p 147