I am presently seated in an office.  Behind me sunlight is banging its fist against a window whose shades are drawn, begging me to notice that Spring is arriving soon.  Perhaps I should be doing work, but instead my mind has turned toward the broader sweep of history, time, philosophy and the role of the individual in the world (it should not be of great surprise that I am embracing such thoughts given that I am reading a biography of one of America’s greatest leaders: John Adams).  I am contemplating the fact that people always seem to “act their age,” that they give in to the demands of “the real world” rather than adhere to the longings of their hearts, and I find myself longing to unfurl my personal manifesto like a flag and plant it deep into the soil of my being.

Poets fight fiercely against the constraints of physics and biology (let’s remember that Dylan Thomas wrote about how we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light) and, on rare occasions, they succeed.  The words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Robert Frost emanate from their throats and make the earth upon which we stand tremble with their passion; that they are buried deep within that earth only serves to amplify the effect.  And so it is for this reason that I, too, think, and feel, and write, for to take the violent passion that makes my flesh shudder with love and transform it into the sweet music of poetry, of entrepreneurship and of justice, is the greatest of endeavors.

Several months ago I received a request from Helen Mou, a Brown University Junior, to sit down for an interview for a writing class she was taking.  The assignment was to write a literary portrait of a person of interest. I greatly enjoyed the process of being interviewed by Helen, and I think she did a great job of capturing my personality in the portrait.  I want to thank Helen for choosing me and for putting so much care and attention into this work.  Read on for the full-text of what Helen wrote.

Here in Los Angeles, where I am visiting my family, a steady rain is falling on the landscape of my childhood.  When I was little, and adulthood was as distant a concept as the stars obscured by the rain I adore so much, I would press my face against the windows of my home and watch water fall from the sky, watch how the branches and the leaves and the creatures of the world would crane their necks to receive succor from the upper atmosphere.  In those moments my love affair with the world began.  I longed to caress the breezes, to embrace the play of light and shadow, to dissolve in the mists that rainy days would bring to me.

Sometimes I grow weary and despondent, hearing of the uphill battle I face as I work to better myself and the world.  At those times, I wonder why, when the Earth bears marvelous fruits in the valleys and plains as well as the peaks, humans relegate the best of what they can do to the impenetrable heights–impenetrable because it takes so much battling just to get there.  I listen to music, watch documentaries, read books, ride my bicycle along the roads that prostrate themselves over the soil, and feel a magical tie to the entire tapestry of history.  What is most powerful about this feeling is that history is so rich with trials, tribulations, successes and fails, that it nearly unfathomable that anything new can ever happen.

Of course, the entire cosmos is forever remaking itself, but in many ways change is always a variation on a theme.  The leitmotif of history, then, appears to be that though events appear different, they are really manifestations of the same thing.  Human foibles and human genius wage war, not armies of individuals driven on by maniacal rulers or misguided beliefs.  We live in a world that is ruled not by gods but by themes, archetypes and myths; the mistake we make is thinking those broader trends are deities who set down laws and instruct us on how to lead our lives.  The truth is that, as Tom Robbins writes in his great book Jitterbug Perfume, “the universe does not have laws, it has habits.  And habits can be broken.”