A Quote by Sven Birkerts
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.
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Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen.
I lived for those moments when we were together, those few times in my life that I actually felt alive.
A person with power controls their life and their destiny. They have a mastery. Their moments are aware moments in this world, never wasted.
Nature is not here to keep you alive. It has just as many ways to kill you as it does to sustain you. And if you cherry-pick this fact, you are left thinking that earth is some haven for life, but 96, 97 percent of all species that ever lived on earth are now extinct from the actions of the earth itself and an occasional asteroid to stir the pot.
We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.
It's been really important to me to create moments where there's a breath or moments where there's a laugh or moments where there's real life that's allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that's what does happen in life.
All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything - every natural and physical law - is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.
If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
Painting and photography keep the creative channel open, and for an actor, it's to keep alive, it's to keep awake, it's to keep watching, it's to keep feeling, it's to keep enjoying, to keep that sensuality of feeling alive.
I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.
In the Himalayas, I spent some of the most exhilarating moments of my life, shooting white water rapids in a kayak.
I felt him there with me. The real David. My David. David, you are still here. Alive. Alive in me.Alive in the galaxy.Alive in the stars.Alive in the sky.Alive in the sea.Alive in the palm trees.Alive in feathers.Alive in birds.Alive in the mountains.Alive in the coyotes.Alive in books.Alive in sound.Alive in mom.Alive in dad.Alive in Bobby.Alive in me.Alive in soil.Alive in branches.Alive in fossils.Alive in tongues.Alive in eyes.Alive in cries.Alive in bodies.Alive in past, present and future. Alive forever.
It is exhilarating and dangerous to perform live. You are walking a tight rope in front of hundreds of people: anything could happen on stage, and whatever does, you must find a way to make it work.
The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy, yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be careful of moments - they're tricksy things.
Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'
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