This is one that I would like to explain to you.
It's a little poem called "For the Old Man Mad
For Drawing, Dead at 89".
Isn't that a terrific title?
And it has a little epigraph under it,
which is a quotation from Hokusai, the painter.
And it reads, "At 90, I shall have penetrated
to the essence of all things".
[LAUGHTER]
Hokusai was Japanese painter who lived
to be while he lived to be 89 years old as the title.
[LAUGHTER]
But once he sat down a kind of testimonial,
in which he declared the credo of his life as a painter,
and he said something to the effect,
I wish I had the whole thing to read to you.
He said, "As a child, I begin to draw the forms of things.
But not until I was 50," and this he wrote when he was,
I don't know how old.
"Not until I was 50 did I do anything
which really satisfied me.
And then at 70, I began to draw accurately things as they truly
were."
And he went on to say that, "At 85, I
shall have made great progress.
At 90, I shall have penetrated to the essence of all things."
"And I invite all of those who live
to be as old as I do to verify whether or not
I am telling the truth."
The idea of that statement intrigued me a good deal.
And I thought it particularly significant
that he should die at 89, one year
before he should have penetrated to the essence of all things.
This late drawing in these deft lines, a corpulent merchant
reclines against a pillow.
Here is a fragile equation for which
there is an Asian origin in this and that and another stroke.
There is something like possibility
succeeding to infinity.
In another year, there might have been here.
Not apparently a corpulent merchant and his pillow,
but really, three long wins converging on the dawn.