Thought For Today
Fredonia NY – I am taking some time to clean out my office files from the 20-odd years of junk they contain. In doing so, I ran into some material I used to post on my bulletin board outside my office from time to time. I thought I would share this particular one from David Mamet, as it seems to be in tune to my recent ruminations. It is from his 1986 lecture at Harvard Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors, and is included in the book Writing in Restaurants.
Things grow over time. We do not conceive and deliver in the same instant; we cannot take in and give out at the same time. There is a time to accumulate and a time to disperse, and the final disassembly is decay, which takes place so that new life may begin….
The problems of the world – AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution – are, finally, no more solvable than the problems of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling – what can be done? The leaves, coincidentally, are falling too, just at the time when they are needed most; and the tree, already weakened, is being weighted down with ice, and the very sap which might sustain the valiant fight to keep life in the tree is draining. What can be done? What can be done about the problems which beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being done – the organism is preparing to rest.
We, as a culture, as a civilization, are at the point where the appropriate, the life-giving, task of the organism is to decay. Nothing will stop it, nothing can stop it, for it is the force of life, and the evidence is all around us….
Now, what about your job?….
….that job is to bring to your fellows, through the medium of your understanding and skill, the possibility of communion with what is essential in us all: that we are born to die, that we strive and fail, that we live in ignorance of why we were placed here, and that, in the midst of this, we need to love and be loved, but we are afraid.
-twl
