With levity and profound insight, artist Maira Kalman reflects on life, death, dinner parties, not knowing the right answers, the joys of eating a hot dog from a street vendor and more. This talk, interwoven with her delightful paintings, is itself an artwork that seems to hold the entirety of life in all its absurd glory. This episode originally aired Dec 6, 2023.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Art has a simple and profound way of illuminating life and connecting us to the world. In this popular archive talk, artist Myra Kalman does just this –
Through talking about her art and practice, she reflects on life, death, dinner parties, and why she loves not knowing the right answers. She reminds us life is worth loving in all its absurd glory. That's coming up.
Every day, I speak to my beautiful and brilliant cousin, Orna, who lives in Israel. In normal times, we talk about which cousin is the bigger idiot, which honey cake recipe to use, which books we're reading, the family stories from Belarus. The conversations are a beacon for me, and they fill my soul and enter my books. The other day, Orna brought up a Romanian philosopher named Emil Cioran.
He was a miserable insomniac who drove everyone nuts because of this. He was relentless in talking about how horrible it was to be alive, and he did this until the age of 85, when he died, which is incredibly ironic. But I must give him credit. He does bring up the essential dilemma. Why are we here? For what purpose? But today, I don't really want to dwell on the morose.
Let's talk about other things. So here's Proust, dead, obviously, or you think he's sleeping, but he's dead, from a series of paintings that I've done called Dead in Bed, which includes Tolstoy and Chekhov, of course. In normal times, and these are not normal times, these are grim times when the world is awash in war and killing, but in normal times, I have a routine.
In the early morning hours, with a strong cup of coffee, I read the obituaries. The infusion of coffee and biography affords me a way to reflect. And it might seem too soon in the day to start with such a tremendous topic, but it is a jolt to action because it reminds me how fragile and how vulnerable we all are and how quickly our lives can end. The night is different.
Then I watch an endless stream of murder mysteries, preferably British. Watching them is a kind of solace. I call this the murder andmanship portion of the day. We have a problem, we solve the problem. People seem briefly upset by the murders, so many in every episode, but there is no time to brood because they have to film the next episode. And they all seem to say, get on with it.
And the idea of prevailing over evil is my lullaby, and I sleep. But what of the day that lies ahead? Every one of us invents the day. Every single day is invented. The actual first day was 13.8 billion years ago, more or less. And maybe, with the information from the Webb telescope, we can actually see the beginning of time, which is an incomprehensible idea, of course.
But what does that perspective afford us when contemplating which tutu to wear, or which insult to respond to, or what book to write. Sometimes, the day is too long, excruciatingly long, and I get out of bed, I look longingly at the bed, and I say to the bed, I will be back soon. And in between, there are things to know and things to not know.
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