PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS: Norm MacDonald on Children and Stendahl Syndrome

From FITZDOG RADIO (with Greg Fitzsimmons)

Norm: Stendahl showed art at an art gallery in the 16 century, and he had all the greatest art of Europe. People would come in, and sometimes they would suffer what later would become known as Stendahl Syndrome. The art would overwhelm them and they would actually break down and squeal with hysteria and then cry, and then go back and forth... just from the beauty of the art.

[Stendahl Syndrome] doesn't have to be art, it can be just that you're so sensitive to the world that you're constantly heartbroken, or constantly the opposite. But children have that... Children squeal with delight one moment, and they're crying the next. They feel terror... we can't feel the terror of a child, even though our terrors are real. But if we ruminate on death, we have these intellectual layers that have to get broken through. A child is much more terrified by a blanket hanging over a bed-stand that looks like a monster. And it's real! And that's what I love about children, they're pure and they're real, and when I saw em at the pre-school, they were all different... When I go to see children, it's the most lovely thing because they're all beautiful and they're all different, and then they grow up and everybody's the fuckin' same...

Greg: You can see some of the art of my daughter on the wall. That's a self portrait up there! There's no fear.

Norm: There's no ambition, there's no self-consiousness in that. It's beautiful.

Greg:
We'll sit across from each other and we'll do this thing where we do portraits of each other at the same time. And mine are always correct.. in the angular part of her nose... and hers... they almost make me see myself in a different way when I see them.

Norm: Yours are facts and hers are truth.

Comments

Anonymous said…
He really needs to look up Stendhal on Wikipedia. He got the wrong name, wrong century, wrong country, and wrong event. And he repeated it on Marc Maron's podcast.

Other than that, he makes a great point and I love him.