My day starts just like yours.
(Laughter) When I wake up in the morning, I check my phone, and then I have a cup of coffee.
But then my day truly starts.
It may not be like yours, because I live my life as an artwork.
Picture yourself in a giant jewelry box with all the beautiful things that you have ever seen in your life.
Then imagine that your body is a canvas.
And on that canvas, you have a mission to create a masterpiece using the contents of your giant jewelry box.
Once you've created your masterpiece, you might think, "Wow, I created that.
This is who I am today."
Then you would pick up your house keys, walk out the door into the real world, maybe take public transport to the center of the town ...
Possibly walk along the streets or even go shopping.
That's my life, every day.
When I walk out the door, these artworks are me.
I am art.
I have lived as art my entire adult life.
Living as art is how I became myself.
I was brought up in a small village called Fillongley, in England, and it was last mentioned in the "Domesday Book," so that's the mentality.
(Laughter) I was raised by my grandparents, and they were antiques dealers, so I grew up surrounded by history and beautiful things.
I had the most amazing dress-up box.
So as you can imagine, it started then.
I moved to London when I was 17 to become a model.
And then I went to study photography.
I wasn't really happy with myself at the time, so I was always looking for escapism.
I studied the works of David LaChapelle and Steven Arnold, photographers who both curated and created worlds that were mind-blowing to me.
So I decided one day to cross over from the superficial fashion world to the superficial art world.
(Laughter) I decided to live my life as a work of art.
I spend hours, sometimes months, making things.
My go-to tool is a safety pin, like this -- (Laughter) They're never big enough.
(Laughter) And I use my fabrics time and time again, so I recycle everything that I use.
When I get dressed I'm guided by color, texture and shape.
I rarely have a theme.
I find beautiful objects from all over the world, and I curate them into 3-D tapestries over a base layer that covers my whole body shape ...
because I'm not very happy with my body.
(Laughs) I ask myself, "Should I take something off or should I put something on?
100 pieces, maybe?"
And sometimes, I do that.
I promise you it's not too uncomfortable -- well, just a little -- (Laughter) I might have a safety pin poking at me sometimes when I'm having a conversation with you, so I'll kind of go off -- (Laughter) It usually takes me about 20 minutes to get ready, which nobody ever believes.
It's true -- sometimes.
So, it's my version of a t-shirt and jeans.
(Laughter) When I get dressed, I build like an architect.
I carefully place things till I feel they belong.
Then, I get a lot of my ideas from lucid dreaming.
I actually go to sleep to come up with my ideas, and I've taught myself to wake up to write them down.
I wear things till they fall apart, and then, I give them a new life.
The gold outfit, for example -- it was the outfit that I wore to the Houses of Parliament in London.
It's made of armor, sequins and broken jewelry, and I was the first person to wear armor to Parliament since Oliver Cromwell banned it in the 17th century.
Things don't need to be expensive to be beautiful.
Try making outfits out of bin liners or trash you found out on the streets.
You never know, they might end up on the pages of "Vogue."
There's over 6,000 pieces in my collection, ranging from 2,000-year-old Roman rings to ancient Buddhist artifacts.
I believe in sharing what I do and what I have with others, so I decided to create an art exhibition, which is currently traveling to museums around the world.
It contains an army of me -- life-size sculptures as you can see behind me, they're here -- they are my life, really.
They're kind of like 3-D tapestries of my existence as living as art.
They contain plastic crystals mixed with diamonds, beer cans and royal silks all in one look.
I like the fact that the viewer can never make the assumption about what's real and what's fake.
I find it important to explore and share cultures through my works.
I use clothing as a means to investigate and appreciate people from all over the world.
Sometimes, people think I'm a performer or a drag queen.
I'm not.
Although my life appears to be a performance, it's not.
It's very real.
People respond to me as they would any other type of artwork.
Many people are fascinated and engaged.
Some people walk around me, staring, brian18@example.net.
Then they come up to me and they say they love or absolutely hate what I do.
I sometimes respond, and other times I let the art talk for itself.
The most annoying thing in the world is when people want to touch the artwork.
But I understand.
But like a lot of contemporary art, many people are dismissive.
Some people are critical, others are abusive.
I think it comes from the fear of the different -- the unknown.
There are so many reactions to what I do, and I've just learned not to take them personally.
I've never lived as Daniel Lismore, the person.
I've lived as Daniel Lismore, the artwork.
And I've faced every obstacle as an artwork.
It can be hard ...
especially if your wardrobe takes up a 40-foot container, three storage units and 30 boxes from IKEA -- (Laughter) and sometimes, it can be very difficult, getting into cars, and sometimes -- well, this morning I didn't fit through my bathroom door, so that was a problem.
(Laughter) What does it mean to be yourself?
People say it all the time, but what does it truly mean, and why does it matter?
How does life change when you choose to be unapologetically yourself?
I've had to face struggles and triumphs whilst living my life as art.
I've been put on private jets and flown around the world.
My work's been displayed in prestigious museums, and I've had the opportunity -- that is my grandparents, by the way, they're the people that raised me, and there I am -- (Laughs) (Applause) So I've been put on private jets, flown around the world, and yet, it's not been that easy because at times, I've been homeless, I've been spat at, I've been abused, sometimes daily, bullied my entire life, rejected by countless individuals, and I've been stabbed.
But what hurt the most was being put on the "Worst Dressed" list.
(Laughter) It can be hard, being yourself, but I've found it's the best way.
There's the "Worst Dressed."
(Laughs) As the quote goes, "Everyone else is already taken."
I've come to realize that confidence is a concept you can choose.
I've come to realize that authenticity is necessary, and it's powerful.
I've tried to spend time being like other people.
It didn't work.
It's a lot of hard work, not being yourself.
I have a few questions for you all.
Who are you?
How many versions of you are there?
And I have one final question: Are you using them all to your advantage?
In reality, everyone is capable of creating their own masterpiece.
You should try it sometime.
It's quite fun.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
I'm just going to play a brief video clip.
Video: On the fifth of December 1985, a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds -- nine times the previous world record.
The buyer was Kip Forbes, son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century.
The original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century.
Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world, the prince of any wine cellar.
Benjamin Wallace: Now, that's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world.
And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock.
In 1985, he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery.
Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall, and happened upon this hidden cache of wines -- apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson.
1787, 1784.
He wouldn't reveal the exact number of bottles, he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building.
The mystery persisted for about 20 years.
It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy.
Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles, and he became suspicious.
And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this.
There's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man, and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes.
But for those 20 years, an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles.
I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world, must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world.
I became increasingly, kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know, why do people spend these crazy amounts of money, not only on wine but on lots of things, and are they living a better life than me?
So, I decided to embark on a quest.
With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes, I decided to sample the very best, or most expensive, or most coveted item in about a dozen categories, which was a very grueling quest, as you can imagine.
(Laughter) This was the first one.
A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing.
It may come from Wagyu cattle, but it's not from the original, Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan.
There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe, and one of them is Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Cut, in Los Angeles.
I went there, and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars.
And it arrived, and it was tiny.
And I was outraged.
It was like, 160 dollars for this?
And then I took a bite, and I wished that it was tinier, because Kobe beef is so rich.
It's like foie gras -- it's not even like steak.
I almost couldn't finish it.
I was really happy when I was done.
(Laughter) Now, the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them, so that's why you're going to see this recurring character.
Which, I guess, you know, communicates to you that I did not think that one was really worth the price.
White truffles.
One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world.
To try this, I went to a Mario Batali restaurant in Manhattan -- Del Posto.
The waiter, you know, came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver, and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said, you know, "Would Signore like the truffles?"
And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma.
It's not in their taste, really.
It's not in their texture.
It's in the smell.
These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles, this haunting, wonderful, nutty, mushroomy smell wafted up.
10 seconds passed and it was gone.
And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that, you know, their purpose had been served, and so I'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me.
There were several -- several of these items were disappointments.
(Laughter) Yeah.
The magazine wouldn't pay for me to go there.
(Laughter) They did give me a tour, though.
And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet.
It has 360-degree views.
It has four balconies.
It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei.
It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver.
It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from.
When I took the tour, it actually included some Opus One, I was glad to see.
30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel.
This is soap that's made from silver nanoparticles, which have antibacterial properties.
I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this.
And it, you know, tickled a little bit and it smelled good, but I have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today.
(Laughter) But then again, nobody has complimented me on the jeans I'm wearing.
These ones GQ did spring for -- I own these -- but I will tell you, not only did I not get a compliment from any of you, I have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that I have owned and worn these.
I don't think that whether or not you're getting a compliment should be the test of something's value, but I think in the case of a fashion item, an article of clothing, that's a reasonable benchmark.
That said, a lot of work goes into these.
They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times.
But no compliments.
(Laughter) Thank you.
Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany.
And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light.
He uses tiny bottles, the glass is tinted, he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas.
And he actually -- once he releases a batch of it, he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online, so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing, and, you know, gauge its freshness.
I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils.
It tasted fine.
It tasted interesting.
It was very green, it was very peppery.
But in the blind taste test, it came in last.
The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months.
(Laughter) A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan -- you'll start to notice.
I don't play golf, so I couldn't actually road test these, but I did interview a guy who owns them.
Even the people who market these clubs -- I mean, they'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther -- but they'll say, look, you know, you're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs.
You're paying for the bling, that they're encrusted with gold and platinum.
The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say that he's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them, so ...
Oh, yeah, you know this one?
This is a coffee made from a very unusual process.
The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet.
It's a cat that lives in trees, and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations.
And apparently it's a very picky eater and it, you know, hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries.
And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans, and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats' leavings then go through the forest collecting the, you know, results and processing it into coffee -- although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form.
That's right.
Unrelatedly -- (Laughter) Japan is doing crazy things with toilets.
(Laughter) There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it.
There's one with a fragrance dispenser.
There's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor.
It's almost like a home medical center -- and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in.
This one does not have those bells and whistles, but for pure functionality it's pretty much the best -- the Neorest 600.
And to try this -- I couldn't get a loaner, but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer, Toto, and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use, which I used.
It's fully automated -- you walk towards it, and the seat lifts.
The seat is preheated.
There's a water jet that cleans you.
There's an air jet that dries you.
You get up, it flushes by itself.
The lid closes, it self-cleans.
Not only is it a technological leap forward, but I really do believe it's a bit of a cultural leap forward.
I mean, a no hands, no toilet paper toilet.
And I want to get one of these.
(Laughter) This was another one I could not get a loaner of.
Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed.
There's a little plaque on the end that, you know, each buyer gets their name engraved on it.
(Laughter) To try this one, the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the Manhattan showroom.
Lights glaring in off the street, and we had to hire a security guard and all these things.
But anyway, we had a great night's sleep.
And you spend a third of your life in bed.
I don't think it's that bad of a deal.
(Laughter) This was a fun one.
This is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car.
I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company, a professional race car driver, and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles and down on the Pacific Coast Highway.
And, you know, when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods.
And it was really amazing.
It was such a smooth ride.
Most of the cars that I drive, if I get up to 80 they start to rattle.
I switched lanes on the highway and the driver, this chaperone, said, "You know, you were just going 110 miles an hour."
And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic, because it was just that smooth.
And if I was a billionaire, I would get one.
(Laughter) This is a completely gratuitous video I'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology.
This is Tom Cruise arriving at the "Mission: Impossible III" premiere.
When he tries to open the door, you could call it "Mission: Impossible IV."
There was one object that I could not get my hands on, and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc.
The '47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century.
And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape.
And 1947 was a legendary vintage, especially in the right bank of Bordeaux.
And just together, that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following.
But it's 60 years old.
There's not much of it left.
What there is of it left you don't know if it's real -- it's considered to be the most faked wine in the world.
Not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist.
So, I'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these.
I'd put out feelers to retailers, to auctioneers, and it was coming up empty.
And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai.
Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings, and he said, "I've got a tasting coming up where we're going to serve the '47 Cheval Blanc."
And it was going to be a double vertical -- it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc, and 30 vintages of Yquem.
And it was an invitation you do not refuse.
I went.
It was three days, four meals.
And at lunch on Saturday, we opened the '47.
And you know, it had this fragrant softness, and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil.
And then I tasted it, and it, you know, had this kind of unctuous, porty richness, which is characteristic of that wine -- that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways.
There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic.
There were some people who were a little less impressed.
And I wasn't that impressed.
And I don't -- call my palate a philistine palate -- so it doesn't necessarily mean something that I wasn't impressed, but I was not the only one there who had that reaction.
And it wasn't just to that wine.
Any one of the wines served at this tasting, if I'd been served it at a dinner party, it would have been, you know, the wine experience of my lifetime, and incredibly memorable.
But drinking 60 great wines over three days, they all just blurred together, and it became almost a grueling experience.
And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech.
And they gave subjects the same wine, labeled with different price tags.
A lot of people, you know, said that they liked the more expensive wine more -- it was the same wine, but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive.
But what was unexpected was that these researchers did MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine, and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more -- their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag.
Thank you.
One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater.
They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull.
As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.
These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land.
In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water.
These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."
Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then.
No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong.
No search party was coming to look for these men.
So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid.
We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean.
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates.
And I think it's no accident that we think this way.
Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists.
So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself.
"Don't worry," we like to say to one another.
"Don't panic."
In English, fear is something we conquer.
It's something we fight.
It's something we overcome.
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.
When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary.
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.
And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination.
But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up.
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down.
But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults.
The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species," "Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past," also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust.
So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children?
Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex.
Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific.
Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship.
The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options.
In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth.
The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.
But they'd heard some frightening rumors.
They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals.
So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner.
Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms.
Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America.
But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water.
To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land.
These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died.
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name.
What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories?
Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it.
It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
And fears and storytelling have the same components.
They have the same architecture.
Like all stories, fears have characters.
In our fears, the characters are us.
Fears also have plots.
They have beginnings and middles and ends.
You board the plane.
The plane takes off.
The engine fails.
Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel.
Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire.
Fears also have suspense.
If I've done my job as a storyteller today, you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex.
Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense.
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
In other words, our fears make us think about the future.
And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.
As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way.
In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another.
When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down.
What would happen to our days?
What would happen to our crops?
What would happen to our minds?
And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night.
If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house?
What will happen to my family?
And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story.
So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories.
But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.
Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others.
I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action.
So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready.
And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true.
That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear.
Once in a while, our fears can predict the future.
But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct.
So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others?
I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example.
After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision.
Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America.
After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land.
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism.
Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick," wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti.
But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals."
So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation?
Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other?
Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading.
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific.
A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story.
As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part.
They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios.
The problem was that they listened to the wrong story.
Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals.
But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.
And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them.
Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate.
Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest.
Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth.
Thank you.
(Applause)