Endings and Improv

“Fifty years earlier, in a state of agitated anxiety, he had told an interviewer, ‘I don’t care about being forgotten. I fear getting to the end of my life and feeling I’ve wasted it. I don’t want to get to the end and think I haven’t tasted enough and touched other people enough and had a good enough time,’” wrote Mark Harris in his superb biography: Mike Nichols — A Life.

“In old age, that fear had vanished. All of his desperate urgency had given way to a serenity he had taken a lifetime to find. At one of his favorite restaurants, he had lunch with a friend whose son was about to go out on his own; he was looking for some advice he could share. Did he have any wisdom he could offer?

“He thought for a moment.

“’Well,’ he said, ‘just s long as he knows that things that start out poorly don’t always end poorly.’

He thought some more.

‘That,’ he said, ‘and study improv.’”