Month: January 2023

“What a good actor–a real actor–is always trying to do is very difficult, almost impossible, so most of the time we fail. Most of the time I fail. Because what I’m after is perfection, truth, reality: Truth in art. This is exceedingly rare. It’s very, very hard to achieve and overwhelming to maintain. So I fail a lot. But if I keep reaching for that perfection, that connection to the script, to the actors, to the audience, I’m becoming a better actor. I’m growing. I’m doing the right work. If you find someone who claims they are always satisfied, always good, a professional who hits the marks, you are not looking at an actor. I’m not going to say what you’re looking at, but it’s not an actor. It’s not an artist. I’m going to say it: What you have is a performer. I am not a performer.” –Kim Stanley/Interview with James Grissom/1992/Photo of Stanley from the 1958 film “The Goddess”

via Silent Lotus

At the start of his latest book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility,” the philosopher Costica Bradatan notes without chagrin that when we consider our origins and our ultimate fate, humans are not very impressive. We are designed to fail, he emphasizes, and death is the framework for all our attempts to make something of ourselves. In a previous book, “Dying for Ideas,” he considered how philosophers across the ages wrestled with mortality. In “In Praise of Failure,” he looks at how various thinkers — Seneca, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran, Yukio Mishima — detached themselves from an obsessive drive for worldly success by reckoning with failure and death. Bradatan wants us to grasp how striving to succeed prevents us from dealing with our mortality and hence from living a more meaningful life.