[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.