WEBVTT

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This is one that I would
like to explain to you.

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It's a little poem called
"For the Old Man Mad

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For Drawing, Dead at 89".

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Isn't that a terrific title?

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And it has a little
epigraph under it,

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which is a quotation from
Hokusai, the painter.

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And it reads, "At 90,
I shall have penetrated

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to the essence of all things".

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[LAUGHTER]

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Hokusai was Japanese
painter who lived

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to be while he lived to be
89 years old as the title.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But once he sat down
a kind of testimonial,

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in which he declared the credo
of his life as a painter,

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and he said something
to the effect,

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I wish I had the whole
thing to read to you.

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He said, "As a child, I begin
to draw the forms of things.

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But not until I was 50," and
this he wrote when he was,

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I don't know how old.

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"Not until I was 50
did I do anything

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which really satisfied me.

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And then at 70, I began to draw
accurately things as they truly

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were."

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And he went on to
say that, "At 85, I

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shall have made great progress.

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At 90, I shall have penetrated
to the essence of all things."

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"And I invite all
of those who live

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to be as old as I do to
verify whether or not

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I am telling the truth."

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The idea of that statement
intrigued me a good deal.

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And I thought it
particularly significant

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that he should die
at 89, one year

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before he should have penetrated
to the essence of all things.

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This late drawing in these deft
lines, a corpulent merchant

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reclines against a pillow.

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Here is a fragile
equation for which

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there is an Asian origin in this
and that and another stroke.

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There is something
like possibility

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succeeding to infinity.

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In another year, there
might have been here.

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Not apparently a corpulent
merchant and his pillow,

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but really, three long wins
converging on the dawn.

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