Human, and loving it
It's a strange thing. While watching the trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (my god, how will I wait), I was overcome with an inexplicable sense of what I can only call an All-Encompassing Love For Humanity: that we are endowed, as a species, with such remarkable diversity and scope as to call forth from mere imagination such things of wonder. It's that sense of gratitude I get from closing an amazing novel and thinking, I'm glad this person existed to have left this behind. It's what drives my irrepressible sense of acquisition - to possess a book, so that I can always reach out and touch this tangible remnant of a great mind; to listen to or play a piece of music over and over again in an unceasing act of reverence (and indeed re-creation) of genius; to paint a piece of art so that I might experience for myself some tiny fraction of artistic mastery; or just to have a glossy print of the Sistine Chapel's Creation of Man hanging on my wall.
But I really do believe that the creation of man (if man was indeed created) is no more (and no less) extraordinary than the creations of man. If there is a God, I'd thank him not for Creation but for creativity; if there is a human soul, it's what seeps out of us, uncontrollably, into our books, theatre, film, music, art, writing and our love and appreciation thereof. It goes wherever our intellectual and everyday pursuits take us; it resides in our inimitable sense of self and goodness. And a life lived devoid of any sense whatsoever of these things is, I believe, really, truly soulless.
yeah, so anyway, I am so looking forward to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Johnny Depp has the most remarkable face. omfg how will I wait??