A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
For both meditation and playing music, this means the brain needs to deactivate circuits associated with self-consciousness and with judgment—the finger-wagging schoolteacher in your brain that is saying "that's terrible!" or "you're not good enough." That school marm is useful when you are editing, but anathema to creativity and spontaneity.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
Talking with a nice lady on the phone. She has a case of the midwinter spiritual rot. And a terminal cold she's had since September 1.
"Well," rasps she, "you don't ever get depressed, do you?"
"Listen," says I, "I get lows it takes extension ladders to get out of."
"So what do you do?" asks she. "I mean, what DO YOU DO?"
Nobody ever pinned me down quite like that before. They usually ask wat I think they should do.
My solace is not religion or yoga or rum or even deep sleep. It's Beethoven. As in Ludwig van. He's my ace in the hole. I put his Ninth Symphony on the stereo, pull the earphones down tight, and lie down on the floor. The music comes on like the first day of creation.
And I think about old Mr. B. He knew a whole lot about depression and unhappiness. He moved around from place to place trying to find the right place. His was a lousy love life, and he quarreled with his friends all the time. A rotten nephew worried him deeply—a nephew he really loved. Mr. B. wanted to be a virtuoso pianist. He wanted to sing well, too. But when he was still quite young, he began losing his hearing. Which is usually bad news for pianists and singers. By 1818, when he was forty-eight, he was stone-cold deaf. Which makes it all the more amazing that he finished his Ninth Symphony five years later. He never really heard it! He just thought it!
-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten
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It may be as impossible to understand the human person by exploring the evolution of the human animal as it is to discover the significance of a Beethoven symphony be tracing the process of its creation.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
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London Symphony Orchestra.....Beethoven's 9th
But I also think that it is important to separate out what is real from what is just a comforting lie that we tell ourselves.
-James O'Malley from his Music Just Changed Forever post
I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer. My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots. William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .
Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people. I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer. I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor. By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.
Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers. Anyway, writing is not a competition to me. Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller. I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.
-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
I grew up under the Cantor's gaze. The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born. Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.
-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
There's always a lesson to be learned
whether in a hotel bar
or over tea in a teahouse,
no matter which way it goes,
for you or against,
what you want to hear or what you don't.
Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,
with two then three saxophones
in his mouth at once
and a kazoo, no less,
hanging from his neck at the ready.
Even in my youth I saw this
not as a lesson in keeping busy
with one thing or another,
but as a joyous impossible lesson
in how to do it all at once,
pleasing and displeasing yourself
with harmony here and discord there.
But what else did I know
as the waitress lit a candle
on my round table in the dark?
What did I know about anything?
-Billy Collins, The Five Spot, 1964
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