One life must be enough
One life is hardly enough. I've had to kill so many lives to be alive in this one. The college professor life. The life lived in the South with the brave dancing words full of sweet storm clouds, grace and the reign of laughter. And me struggling with a first collection of short stories.
The life on the Northeast Ohio farm with mist like the secret birthing night breath of angels coming up off the five a.m. fields and the grey birds praising the new coming day in their secret symphonic language, full of mercy and foreshadowing. The life of the pianist braving The Well-Tempered Clavier, making the Mozart glimmer with purity, getting the warm fire of the Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes and Etudes under the palms of miracle hands, making Ravel's impressionist poems come in and out of focus, breathing all the while.
The young are apple trees. We prune off many limbs so that we might bear a little fruit. One life must be enough, but damn. (p. 18)
Yes, Linford, yes. Damn.
Labels: beautiful things, inspiration, life, literature, music, sunday scribblings
| 12:26 AM
1 Comments:
Wow, Linford! I've been thinking along these lines lately, especially while I was on vacation. "We could move here," I'd say, picturing it all in my mind. Where we would shop, go to church, how I would decorate our farm house, the kick-ass garden I would make...And then I'd realize that I'd have to give up my LIFE to do this. And I'm reading a travel book by Frances Mayes, and she does the same thing, wondering how she can have lived so long in the world without visiting these tiny European villages that just call to her when she sees them, and in a flash, she sees her life there.
We do tend to narrow ourselves down.
Damn.
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