EXCERPT FROM “Do Something Lasting” – The Best Advice I Ever Got

“To this day, I do not remember what feeble question I asked him [the author of “A View from the Bridge,” a play SO not about a bridge] to get him to speak. It doesn’t really matter now, I suppose, but Miller’s few-sentence answer constituted the sum total of the interview, and it stayed with me, like the panic, the rest of my life. I know it by heart. He said, ‘You see, the city is fundamentally a practical, utilitarian invention—and it always was. And then suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there and it’s a shock. It puts everything to shame and makes you wonder what else we could have done that was so marvelous and so unpresumptuous. It carries its weights, it does what it’s supposed to do and yet... I mean they could have built another Manhattan Bridge and [Roebling] didn’t. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. So it makes you feel that maybe you, too, could add something that would last and be beautiful.’”

—Emmy Award-winning Director and Producer, Ken Burns