Ken Burns

At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it.

And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for The Washington Post, said – I think it's Keats – writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare had negative capability.

That means he could hold in tension the positive and negative aspects of a character.

for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives.

When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, F you, whatever that is, we make judgments about it.

And Shakespeare had that ability even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iagos and the Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark.

He had negative capability.

He said that's what we need to grow in order to understand

The steroid era in order to understand how to deal with all of that.

And I think that in a way all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect and that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.

Right.

No one passes the test.

I think it's the only way, and it takes time.

And I am very... I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me, you know, than PBS, right?

Where I have the time to do it.

It's sort of like an NIH grant.

Like, here, we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.

Can you have it next Thursday?

Well, no, you can't have it next Thursday.

That's what Hollywood says.