Robert Pattinson On Life Beyond Twilight
Text taken from this article, with a few embellishments
Rob and I discover we share a mutual fascination
with afflictions that maim and disfigure and disgust:
He brings up cancrum oris, in which bacteria gnaws at the side
of your face until you get kind of a window in your head
and the entire world sees your teeth, shining white like a row
of piano keys. I mention cyclic vomiting syndrome,
a condition in which you puke all the goddamn time, and he
delights in lymphatic filariasis, where parasitic worms
burrow into your lymph nodes and can make balls swell
to the size of watermelons, forcing you to tote them around
in a large wheelbarrow. All this could make one hell
of a blockbuster hit movie, we agree, with a load of extras
and a few elephants, elephant actors like him. He wonders
if on some cosmic level, he might be a bit like elephants.
Do you know how they die? He asks me, as he sips his beer.
The elephant trainer told me their molars get ground down
from eating all that wood but regenerate like six times.
And after that they slowly starve to death.
Which is poignant and also must be what gives them time
to wander empty-stomached to the elephant graveyard.
They're incredibly designed creatures, he says.
I mean, people hang on way too fucking long.
