It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do

Host: The dawn broke like a wound — soft, trembling, and alive with a kind of light that didn’t so much arrive as it emerged, slowly, like the world remembering itself. The studio was thick with the smell of oil, turpentine, and rain drifting through the half-open window.

Canvas leaned against the walls like sleeping giants, each half-born, each waiting for its next breath of color. The floor was a battlefield of brushes, rags, and palette knives, each one carrying traces of previous wars fought between vision and doubt.

Jack sat in the corner, cigarette half-burnt between his fingers, watching the smoke rise like a ghost of unspoken thoughts. Across from him, Jeeny stood barefoot before a canvas, her hair tied back messily, her fingers stained with paint, her eyes alive with that dangerous glow of someone who believed that art was both salvation and sickness.

Jeeny: (without looking at him, her voice low but burning) “It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.”

(She pauses, her brush suspended midair.) Frank Auerbach said that.

Jack: (grinning faintly) And you believe him, don’t you?

Jeeny: (softly) Of course I do. What else is there? What else is worth the hours we’re given if not what makes you feel alive?

Jack: (blowing smoke) Survival, maybe. Rent. Groceries. Reality.

Jeeny: (turning toward him, eyes sharp) That’s not living, Jack. That’s stalling.

Host: Her words hung in the air — fierce, luminous, trembling with truth. The light from the window caught on her paint-smeared cheek, making her look like some half-mythic creature of color and conviction.

Jack: (dryly) You make it sound like anything that isn’t art is cowardice.

Jeeny: (gently) Maybe it is. Not because it’s wrong — but because it’s safe.

Jack: (leaning forward) You think safety is the enemy of meaning?

Jeeny: (nodding slowly) Don’t you?

Host: The wind slipped in through the window, rattling the edge of a canvas, scattering a few papers to the floor. The sunlight was getting stronger now, painting the room in bands of gold and shadow.

Jack: (murmuring) You talk like every day’s a death sentence.

Jeeny: (softly) Isn’t it? Every morning you wake up is a borrowed miracle. And what do most people do with it? They waste it — on things they don’t love, on routines they don’t believe in.

Jack: (quietly) Some people don’t have the luxury of choice, Jeeny.

Jeeny: (turning sharply) It’s not about luxury. It’s about urgency. Every second is a chance to do something that outlives you. That’s what Auerbach meant. It’s madness to forget how temporary we are.

Host: She spoke with a kind of trembling fervor, her voice both fragile and invincible. Jack watched her as though trying to remember what it felt like to care that much about anything.

Jack: (smiling faintly) You paint like you’re fighting something invisible.

Jeeny: (smiling back) I am. Time.

Host: The word lingered — heavy, inevitable. Outside, a truck rumbled by, the faint sound of morning traffic beginning to hum through the waking city. The moment — fragile and eternal — quivered between silence and meaning.

Jack: (after a pause) You ever get tired of it? The constant need to create?

Jeeny: (quietly) No. I get tired of being alive without creating. There’s a difference.

Jack: (leaning back, thoughtful) You make it sound like art’s a religion.

Jeeny: (smiling softly) Maybe it is. The only one that lets you doubt and still keeps you worshiping.

Host: The light shifted again — the kind of light that reveals and destroys in equal measure. Jeeny’s shadow stretched across the floor, long and delicate, touching the edge of a paint-splattered easel.

Jack: (after a beat) You know, sometimes I think the real madness isn’t waking up and not painting — it’s believing that painting will save you.

Jeeny: (turning back to the canvas) Maybe it won’t save me. But it keeps me from dying before I have to.

Host: Her brush moved across the canvas again, slow and deliberate. Each stroke was like a heartbeat — imperfect, persistent, human. Jack watched in silence, the smoke curling from his cigarette like a thought he was afraid to say aloud.

Jack: (murmuring) You ever think about what you’d do if you couldn’t paint?

Jeeny: (without turning) That’s like asking what I’d do if I couldn’t breathe.

Jack: (smiling faintly) You’d find another way. People always do.

Jeeny: (softly) Maybe. But why would I, if I can still breathe this way?

Host: The studio seemed to hold its breath with her. The sound of the brush against the canvas was a whisper, a rhythm. Outside, the world carried on — indifferent, unstoppable — but inside, something eternal was happening quietly, stubbornly.

Jack: (after a long pause) You know, I envy that. The single-mindedness. The way you wake up and just know what your day is for.

Jeeny: (smiling, her voice soft but certain) Everyone knows what their day is for, Jack. Most just forget to listen.

Host: The light climbed higher, gilding the edges of the paint, making everything seem momentarily divine. Jeeny stepped back, studying her work — not proud, not satisfied, just present.

Jack: (quietly) So that’s it? That’s what keeps you going — the idea that tomorrow might not come?

Jeeny: (nodding) That’s what gives today its shape.

Jack: (whispering) Then every brushstroke is a defiance.

Jeeny: (smiling) Every one.

Host: The camera might have pulled in then — on the trembling light across her face, on Jack’s eyes soft with reluctant awe, on the streaks of color that blurred the line between chaos and beauty.

The world outside roared, but in that small studio, time stood still — suspended between mortality and meaning.

Host (closing):
Because some mornings remind us that madness is not the absence of reason,
but the refusal to waste what little time we have on anything that doesn’t ignite the soul.
And to wake, to breathe, to create —
is the most beautiful kind of insanity there is.