Sustenance

On days when there's no time to walk, only time to drive, the radio sustains me. The last 24 hours have been like that.

Yesterday I heard an interview with filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, who explained why, after stints in Britain and the United States, he is once again living in his native India:

"You can stand in one place and look to your right, and you see a funeral. Look to your left, and you see a marriage. Look in front of you, and you see little children that are born and are starving in the streets. And look behind you, and somebody's driving a Bentley," he says. "You're suddenly faced with the contradictions of just living, and you realize just how mortal you are. And in that mortality, you're pushed into the idea that life is not under your control — it's completely chaotic." This chaos keeps him on edge, Kapur says, keeps "more creatively alive."

And then, on this morning's "Writer's Almanac," these words from the novelist Andrea Barrett: "I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. ... We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write. We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we're not of it. ... You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world."


The radio provides aural sustenance; this photo of Hallstatt, Austria provides visual sustenance.