I'm very honored to introduce Jennifer Lee
Carrell as the next reader.
Jennifer wanted to be an astronaut or a ballerina
when she was growing up.
She went to Harvard and became a Shakespearean scholar,
then she became a best-selling author.
And one of her books has been translated into 28 languages.
Well, I call that dancing on the moon.
Please welcome Jennifer Lee Carrell.
Thank you, Howard.
Those of you who know my work, might be expecting
me to read from Shakespeare.
But I'm going to throw you a bit of a curveball
and leap forward many centuries, whole centuries, although,
not into this one, and read something
by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was one of Shakespeare's
great followers in blank verse.
This is an excerpt from "Ulysses."
"I cannot rest from travel.
I will drink life to the leaves All times
I have enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly,
both with those that loved me, and alone--
on shore, and when through scudding drifts
the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea.
I am become a name.
For always roaming with a hungry heart,
much have I seen and known--
cities of men and manners, climates, councils,
governments, myself not least, but honored of them all.
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met,
yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams
that unraveled world, whose margin fades forever
and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished,
not to shine in use.
As though to breathe for life.
Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me
little remains.
But every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something
more--
a bringer of new things.
And vile it were for some three sons to store and hoard myself.
And this great spirit yearning and desire to follow knowledge
like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
Well, we're talking a little bit about what poetry means to us,
and so I just tell you a little bit why I chose that one.
When I first read it, I fell in love
with it many, many years ago.
And it did what I think great poems do.
Its cadences wove their way deep into my consciousness,
and it has become a kind of shaping
force I guess to my very idea of what a life lived
well and fully would be.
So it's a poem that's very dear to my heart.
I happen to love blank verse and its sort
of amazing combination of infinite flexibility
and demanding form.
So I love that.
Right now, it's also got an extra dimension to my life
because poetry has all different kinds of uses.
And this one right now is sitting on my desk
as I work on my next book, which is about the great 15th century
artist Jan van Eyck.
And you might say, what does he have to do with Ulysses?
Well, you know, he's quite famous as an artist of a light
and perspective and detail--
a great experimenter as the medieval period
became the Renaissance.
But what many people don't know is that he was also a spy,
and he was paid exorbitant sums to travel to unnamed and secret
locations.
And in the historical record, there
are hints that some of them lay at or just
beyond the bounds of not human thought
but at least what was comfortably known about Europe.
So, in my mind, at least in the way that I'm making him up,
he is a kind of avatar of Ulysses.
So I'm using this poem as I try to do my own kind
of creative writing.
What I thought I'd read next is--