I know life leaves me with each breath I take,
and these last fifty years I’ve been asleep.
Not much time remains. How, in what’s left,
can I make up for all I haven’t done?
The man who chooses not to start his work
will die when God beats the drum of his death,
and he will die in shame,…
When did we become so small and so apologetic? Why do we apologize for our humanity? Love what you love, and make no apologies. This is your identity. The most horrendous suspensions of freedom are self-imposed. We imprison ourselves daily, hourly.
We have one life, one shot at all the glorious things of life, and we walk about constricted, apologetic, afraid. We have so little time; we have so little space upon which to spread our love and our talents and our kindness. Run toward life fulsomely and freely.
It runs from us so quickly, like a frightened dog or youth or daylight. Chase it and care for it.
Of course art should be about something big. Something terribly big must be at stake. I don’t see this anymore. Our art is becoming terribly polite and apologetic, much like us. It slinks away like a sagging breast, empty of milk or promise or comfort.
We need to get very fervent again. We need to get jacked up.
“Life may be a mess: You may have a hundred crises forcing their way into your mind and your heart. But—and I stress this—the theatre and the person you bring to the theatre must be pure and clear and ready only for the work at hand. Your fellow actors, the stage manager, the dresser—they don’t need to know the drama you have at home or in your life.
Pour it all into the performance. Blow away the audience with your intensity, but don’t alienate or alarm your coworkers with the diary of your life. And the theatre becomes therapy. So does the commute to the theatre. Just wash it all away, store it, command it to sit and be still. You’ll work a lot of it out in the performance, so that by the time you face down the problem at home, it’s smaller and it knows its place, and it knows that you’ve been made stronger by giving to others, by prioritizing, by doing the right thing.”
Colleen Dewhurst
Interview with James Grissom/1990. Photography by Josef Astor.
via Follies of God
You will not know this for some time, but the longing for something—for someone—is vastly superior to possession. The strain of desire is the greatest sensation, the ultimate folly of God. I believe this is why we are always dissatisfied with art and life and people and experience: nothing can compete with our imaginations and our strength of desire. It is wise to always desire something, to keep something of a flame, an energy, to one’s life and heart.
Tennessee Williams
From Follies of God
yes to this 1 million times….
“We all have our dark side, full of crevices of hatred and rage and pettiness, and our job—as I see it—is to subdue these base impulses and feelings, and we do it with religion and good deeds and afternoons with lubricious friends. Whatever we do, we do it, and the nasty things stay in the dark. There is a place for the nasty things, however: In our work. Every murderous thought, every vengeful desire I have ever harbored has found its way into a performance, a gesture, a costume. I have lived an evil life through my work. I am lucky. Then I go home and I am a complete angel.” —Alec Guinness/Interview with James Grissom/Photograph by Steve Schapiro/
“Life isn’t supposed to be easy, for God’s sake. Life is supposed to be a series of challenges we rush into, conquer, or get felled by. How great those challenges are! They’re what make us. People are always praying for signs, and I think the signs are the challenges.”
~Katharine Hepburn to James Grissom (1990). Photographed as the Madwoman of Chaillot (1969).
(source: Follies of God)
Cory Doctorow on The War on General Purpose Computing, the Transhuman Futurepresent, Health, Wealth, Prosthetics and You.
“You should care about privacy because if the data says you’ve done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light. Naked Citizens, a short, free documentary, documents several horrifying cases of police being told by computers that…
