Finding "the Ache" in "the Spine"

What a great set of terms for the challenge of discerning, narrowing and navigating our own pairs of Moonshots and Tsunamis. Here's Trish Deitch, Remembering Sydney Pollack

In the nineties, I worked for Sydney Pollack as a story editor. When Sydney, who died on Monday at the age of seventy-three, read a film script, he’d look for one word that would become what he called “the spine” of the story. The word that made up the spine of “Out of Africa,” he told me, was “home.” “Home” was the secret meaning of “Out of Africa”—its magnetic north, the direction towards which all compass points could, and would, slide when the film’s writers, actors, or director lost their creative way.

Finding the spine of a story like “Out of Africa” was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called “the ache.” The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us. [Emphasis mine - Fouro.]

Look for the one word, a magnetic north, to re-find your way. Very nice.

via daring fireball by way of Michael Sippey

[updated 1:27 for sloppy cut/paste and link credit]