Fata Organa
n.
a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room— their mind wandering away from whatever’s happening around them, their eyes lighting up with pensiveness or vulnerability or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains, watching actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for some other production.
From fata morgana, a kind of mirage that warps the appearance of distant objects so that sailboats look like fairy castles + organa, methods by which a philosophical investigation may be conducted. Pronounced “fah-tuh awr-gah-nuh.”
