不是我看到的東西阻止我，麥克斯。而是我看不見的東西。你懂嗎？是那些我無法看見的。偌大的城市，綿延無盡，但卻沒有盡頭。根本沒有盡頭。我看不見的，正是一切結束的地方，是這個世界的盡頭。（It wasn't what I saw that stopped me, Max. It was what I didn't see. Can you understand that? What I didn't see. In all that sprawling city, there was everything except an end. There was everything. But there wasn't an end. What I couldn't see was where all that came to an end. The end of the world. ）
拿鋼琴來比喻吧，鍵盤有始，也有終，88個鍵就在那裡，這錯不了；它並不是無限的，但音樂卻是無限的。我能在有限琴鍵上演奏出無限的音樂。我喜歡這樣，我也應付得來（I like that. That I can live by. ）。
但當走過舷梯之後，前面會有……人生成千上萬的琴鍵，那是真實且沒有盡頭的，麥克斯。那個鍵盤是無限大的。當琴鍵無限大，就無法在那鍵盤上演奏出音樂；那不是給凡人彈奏的，那是屬於上帝的鋼琴（But if that keyboard is infinite there's no music you can play. You're sitting on the wrong bench. That's God's piano.）。
我出生在這艘船上，與這世界擦身而過。每回上船的僅有兩千人，不過這裡充滿了希望，但這夢想僅存於船的船尾之間。（I was born on this ship. The world passed me by, but two thousand people at a time. And there were wishes here, but never more than could fit on a ship, between prow and stern. ）
用有限的琴鍵奏出自己的幸福，這就是我學會的生活之道。
陸地，對我而言，是艘太過龐大的船，是個太漂亮的女子，是條太漫長的旅程，是瓶太濃烈的香水，是篇我無從彈奏的樂章（It's music I don't know how to make.）。
停擺在「介紹」Ginsburg的層次，紀錄片的「觀點」淡薄。腳本一味強調她非常人、tough的人設，彷彿即能順理其後於社會動盪、轉型中拼搏的渠成，似乎難有其他更深刻的脈絡理解了。不免流於簡單。原是期待，“case by case”，示意言詞機鋒裡有著如何的洞見，而為這些洞見的實踐、打造，實是輝映於策略以外的偉大人格。
該片維基百科式順序條列Ginsburg出生至今的「成就軸」（early life and education, personal life, career。。。云云），「fighting」的過程相對著墨甚微，少見考據與揣摩，淨是以重複畫面（提名大法官的聽證會。。。）、幾組受訪者拼湊過場，還以為是SOT帶子那樣的電視專題。
片中還是有亮點。Ginsburg提到母親生前的教育，be a lady與independent，說明她人格魅力的養成。維州軍校案，時過境遷，如今已是招收女軍校生的二十週年慶祝場合，不言自明憲法判決如何影響許多女性的生涯。以及，Ginsburg在被問到如何應對無視歧視存在的守舊派，她自認是「幼稚園老師」的帥勁（不過，這在台灣恐怕被打成菁英的傲慢吧）。
較之起來，早先看的劇情片《法律女王》（On the Basis of Sex）將重點放在Ginsburg的發跡，從男性為主的法學院再到法庭，如何與丈夫相偕成就家庭與志業；其中，透過一個初期案件，十足表彰RBG本色，勇敢決斷又至情動人。我在看《RBG》時常腦補《法律女王》所得的理解，方能不淹沒於流水帳般的記述。
She said, "We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
"You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."
The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.
