The media is full of stuff about the Academy Awards today.
The two best quotes I read today had only a peripheral relationship to the big event — which, like millions of others, I watch until the (yawn) end.
This from a Parade Magazine interview with Viggo Mortensen, the reluctant hero of the Lord of the Rings, Aragorn:
“I knew early on that life is sorrowful”, he replied. “We all decline, slowly or quickly, and we die. We can’t change that. Be we can change our attiude toward it.”
He paused a mement, then added: “We each have only a limited amount of time here. We have to do more with it — pay attention, explore, be open to all of life. Because we have only one chance, we have to make life seem longer than it really is.”
And from piece about the Academy Awards by Diane Cameron, my favorite local columnist, in today’s local newspaper:
It’s also tempting to disdain movies as just entertainment, but we have to remember that movies, even bad ones, become part of us. They are now what plays or poems were in the past: important sources of metaphor and imagery that we draw on in viewing our world and in our own identity formation. Human beings are always making stories and talking to themselves. Stories with pictures are even better. The best movies, though, are the ones in which we star. No need to be embarrassed. It’s a fact that most of us are watching and narrating our own story a lot of the time: “This is me shopping, this is me eating, this is me walking down the street.”
[snip]
We might suspect that with all of the new home entertainment technology, the movie business will shift to all-TV and we’ll simply get our movies at home. But that ignores something older that draws us to the movie theater. That is the ancient urge we have to come together with others in the dark to listen to stories.
And there is also, now, the storytelling in the dark of the Blog.