The Promise is the Work

There’s this touching little documentary/long form interview with Maurice Sendak called “Tell Them Anything You Want” that I find myself coming back to periodically. It was filmed by Spike Jonze and his crew, a few years before Sendak’s death, while they were working on Where the Wild Things Are.

There’s a moment late in the documentary where Sendak is walking into his studio and he says:

“The whole promise is to do the work.

I’m sitting down at the drawing table, turning on the radio, and I think what a transcendent life this is.

In that moment I feel like a lucky man.”

It knocks me flat every time.