Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.”

In 1979, struggling to write a script for a weeklong series on “Going to School,” he wrote in a note to himself: “Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. Why don’t I trust myself? Really that’s what it’s all about . . . that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL

... See more

I view the last quarter of my life—because statistically, at almost sixty, that’s the phase I’m entering—in line with Glenn Gould’s maxim, which I’ve copied so often into so many successive notebooks: “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder

... See more

Do I think there’s time? What is this book except proof that there’s always time, and that we’re always moving through it? There’s this show on HBO called “Witness,” a documentary series about photojournalists in the world’s trouble spots. We just ran a short review of it in the New Yorker, and in her piece, Emily Nussbaum made a point of how deepl

... See more

In late 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was given up as dead after being flung from a galloping horse. As his friends carried his limp and bloodied body home, Montaigne watched life slip away from his physical self, not traumatically but almost flimsily, like some dancing spirit on the “tip of his lips.” Only to have it return at

... See more