[MUSIC PLAYING]
You know, one of
the things that's
interesting about
human beings is
that we talk about
living in the moment.
We want to live and experience.
Yet at the same time, when
an experience is rapturous,
it feels as though
the experience
is owed a poem
rendered in real time.
The experience is
asking to be captured.
And I think one of the
quotes that really distills
the human desire to capture the
world, to take a picture of it,
to snapshot it, and make it
fit, so that it can hold it
in a kind of stasis
is the quote that
says, "To see the world
in a grain of sand,
to see heaven in a wild
flower, hold infinity
in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour."
That desire to capture
and arrest in permanence.
Faulkner used to talk about
the writer's futile yet noble
efforts to fit the world
inside of a sentence,
to capture the world and code it
and store it inside of a page.
The photographer tries to take
a still frame of the universe.
The filmmaker who distills
truth 24 times per second at due
persistence of vision
and psychic continuity
can externalize the human
mind and capture the world
on celluloid.
Or the engineers who built
the Hubble Space Telescope
that maybe can
mainline space and time
through the optic nerve,
as Ross Anderson says,
inducing ontological awakening
in the receiver's mind,
the person who looks at
the deep field photograph
as he has a forceful
reckoning with what is.
In all of these
different technologies,
all of these different
tools that we
have created to capture and
encode reality as it's lived.
To arrest that just passing of
the moment with nothingness,
and that is the human condition.
That's what we do.
