I want More Life

I was just watching one of my all time favourite movies, Angels in America. It was made into a Miniseries a few years back by HBO, with Meryl Streep and Al Pacino.

It’s one of those movies I can watch over and over and over. It was originally written as a play by Tony Kushner. It’s set five years into the HIV/AIDS crisis. Angels in America is two books, and two shows – “Part 1: Millennium Approaches” and “Part 2: Perestroika”. I read the books in college, and they’re great too, if you can get past the fact that you’re essentially reading a script.

This is one of my favourite monologues of all time. Maybe it’s Justin Kirk in the miniseries that sold me on it. Maybe it’s Kushner’s writing. It just hits a nerve everytime. Here’s the best clip I could find of my favourite scene. I appologize for the subtitles… The only one I could find sans- subtitles was in a foreign launguage!.

Anyway, for those of you uninterested in the video, I leave you with Prior’s quote – or the point, as it were-in writing… Rings true, more each passing day.

“But still.
Still bless me anyway.
I want more life.
I can’t help myself.
I do.
I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse.
But you see them living anyway.
When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children – they live.
Death usually has to take life away.
I don’t know if that’s just the animal.
I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive.
So we live past hope.
If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do.
It’s so much not enough.
It’s so inadequate.
But still bless me anyway.
I want more life.”