Who I Am—Now

WELL, TO BEGIN WITH, I'm a heck of a lot older—eighty-five, to be exact—and luckily still in very good health. In any case, I feel very young, more or less just as I felt when I was twentytwo. I am also fortunate that I love work, and love working hard. No, I'm not a workaholic. I just enjoy my work, and it consumes virtually my entire life. It may sound funny, but I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for my work. In fact, the word “work” is hardly in my vocabulary, at least in the sense that most people use the word, as something onerous or awful, as something to constantly complain about. My work has been my life, and it has been largely a fulfilling joy—a fair share of unpleasant experiences notwithstanding.

I can't think of a single day in my life in which, upon getting up, I didn't know what I was going to do that day, what exciting things I was going to undertake and perhaps even accomplish. I have tried to fill every day with useful work, to contribute in some significant way to society, to humanity, to the world—if that doesn't sound too pretentious. How and how much we artists do or realistically contribute to humankind, to the common good—especially in a currently far too materialistic world—is an open question. All I can say for myself is that I at least have tried very hard to use my all too brief time on this planet as fruitfully as possible, as productively as I could imagine.

I take things very seriously. I always have, even as a young boy. By my philosophy of life, life is much too short to be unserious. This has nothing to do with not having fun, with not enjoying life. Serious does not mean unhappy. I have often been considered to be too serious. Even as a kid in school, whether in elementary school in New York or Germany, or later at St. Thomas, I was always teased for being “too serious.” I was considered weird. But such people don't know how much fun I've had in my life. In fact part of being serious is having fun. I was very serious about enjoying life and having fun—whatever kind of fun one wants to imagine.