Why not the life?

I'm writing a lot lately. (More on that soon…) It's enjoyable. Tiring. But it means I'm too busy to blog the way I like to blog (in long, rambling meditations on Christ knows what). So here's someone older and wiser than me to keep you happy, or miserable. This is Jack Gilbert, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. He was 80 when he said this, back in 2005, and renting a room in a friend's house in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The interviewer, Sarah Fay, asked him “What, other than yourself, is the subject of your poems?”

"Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don't know why people limit it to riches, pride, security–all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can't see anything from a car. It's moving too fast. People take vacations. That's their reward–the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives–until it's too late. Though I understand that often you don't have a choice."

A note on the images: they are taken from the first solo exhibition in Europe of the Tokyo-based artists Exonemo, hosted in the Basel gallery [plug.in]. The piano and tape recorder are part of an installation called UN-DEAD-LINK, in which Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa from Exonemo modified the computer game Half-Life2 and connected its output to a piano upstairs (and to a sewing machine, paper-shredder, music turntable, some lamps...) Each death in the game turns on a machine. The murdered mouse is taken from the Exonemo film  DanmatsuMouse...