Students of music have to understand that when they are playing, somebody is hearing. If there is nobody there, well, G-d is hearing you then.
- Dafnis Prieto, quoted in Being Here: Conversations on Creating Music
Students of music have to understand that when they are playing, somebody is hearing. If there is nobody there, well, G-d is hearing you then.
A hull made to touch
the arctic shoulder of the vacant
sea.
Alan Felsenthal, “Lowly”
Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale, 2008, translated 2011.
“The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle towards a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.”
One of my favorite books. I read it first 20 years ago as a memoir, not a novel. Whatever it might be, it’s a wonderful book.
Ben Lerner had a nice piece on it in the New Yorker a while back.