[b]Neil Gaiman
If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?[/b]
Uh, sometimes?
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.
He wondered: Could that possibly be applicable in turn to what we do here?
I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last.
Not only that but all of the “stuff” that you are now came from stars, will return to stars.
You know, for whatever that’s worth.
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.
So, is that more before or more after we get to the part we call philosophy?
The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.
Or you can focus more instead on how much it fetches at the auction.
You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?
I dabble, she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.
In America of course almost no one says they dabble.