G. Steve Journal

You Did It

Just came across this provocative excerpt on swiss-miss from an interview with sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Overwhelmingly Beautiful

Theres a remarkable story on NPR about a darkroom technician in Indiana who salvages some color slides that are headed for the trash and subsequently discovers the work of one Charles Cushman, an early adopter of the brand new technology of color photography.

Cushman documents, almost obsessively, his travels around the country, pointing his camera at everything -- from the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge to inner city families to pastoral scenes and everything in between.

Though there is apparently not much of a record of what motivated Cushman, except for the images themselves, the narrator suggests that Cushman was using photography to uncover beauty and bring meaning and order to an otherwise chaotic world:

I think the camera was a way of putting a frame around that, codifying it -- just being able to deal with it in some way that made it manageable....a lot of times I think that's what this life is about -- being able to come to terms with the things you find so overwhelmingly beautiful.