Tuesday, July 2, 2002

"What is the secret of life?" the poet Donald Hall once asked the eighty-year-old sculptor Henry Moore. "With anyone else," Hall commented, "the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh," but Henry Moore answered the question in straight-forward, pragmatic terms:

"The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire

life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for

your whole life. And the most important thing isóit must be something

you cannot possibly do!"

...from a book review by Dana Gioia of Donald Hall's _Life Work_

First published in The Los Angeles Times Book Review (January 23, 1994)