2020.08.30
At the end of his life, the great picture book author Maurice Sendak said on the NPR interview show Fresh Air, "I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more." He said, "I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world." And I remember, when I first listened to that interview, wondering if I would ever feel that way.
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it in the last couple years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is merely to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling, make a joke, I don't want to feel this, because I've loved enough to know how loving ends. They die and I can't stop them, Sendak said. But to fall in love with the world is to let the world crack you open anyway.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.Surprised I don't think I've cited that idea on this blog before - inspired by this McGST post about the author's family heavily into the Apple ecosystem...
Forget trying to make a kidz bop version of the Card B's raunchy hit "WAP"... I want the geek deep-cut followup "WML"