Check out this awesome shirt my dad just bought me:

A Josquin shirt! How awesome is that? He got it from academy records. He said they told him he was the only one to ever actually buy that shirt. I guess the rest of New York is missing out on an awesome shirt, but I’m really excited for mine!

It is difficult to discuss what there is in life that makes it truly worth living, because whatever that force is, it is constantly escaping our grasp. It takes many names, sometimes it is known as Love, sometimes Beauty, but this only transfigures the question of life making us ponder what the true essence of Love and beauty is. The answer to these questions surely escapes words, and this is one of the reasons I have always felt that music is so powerful, because it allows us to tackle these questions in a place beyond semantic understanding where the questions and their answers can simply resonate inside of us without the need to pin them down in a way we know we cannot.

In the movie Wall E these questions were explored in another way. [SPOILERS] By placing us in a future where, thanks to technology, life’s problems are minimal and survival is assured, the inexplicable thing that we stand to lose in exchange for automation and technology was brought into focus. In a future where people can no longer walk because they don’t have to, and people are no longer aware of those around them or where they are, because they are constantly on their computers, we sense that something important from life is fundamentally missing. Something that is finding its way back when the ship’s captain discovers a curiosity for nature on earth, and learns after many lost generations, what it means to dance. Something in the air when two of the ship’s passengers notice each other, notice the stars, and spend a late night splashing each other in the pool. Something in the spark of the kiss between Wall E and Eve when they discover Love in a toxic, garbage filled world all but devoid of life. Something inexplicably captured when the captain exclaims, “I don’t want to survive, I want to Live!” By placing us in a world where life is no longer truly worth living, Wall E allows us to rediscover, along with the future humans and robots, why it was worth living in the first place and why it’s worth living for us now. It was a really beautiful movie, and offered a powerful commentary on the uninhibited use of technology as well as the dangers of the unchecked corporation.

Though I cannot tell you anymore now then I could before why life is worth living, through the transfiguration of this question in Wall E into questions such as, why love and why strive for more than the ‘perfect life’ technology has to offer, a lot emerged. In the transfiguration of a question a lot can emerge.  This is something that art has shown us time and time again and something in itself perhaps worth living for.