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STILL ALIVE. And chapter 30 of fta is up!!

fta music

Prokofiev: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7YgZ8J-PA
Shostakovich: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZbJOE9zNjw&feature=related
Tchaikovsky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2tTfTVzD0M&feature=related

words to live by

If there is a choice, I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.

—Mstislav Rostropovich

I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.

Most people never get to hear this music. Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us. Bach wrote the Cello Suites for his young wife as an exercise to help her learn the cello. But inside each note is the love we are unable to express with words.

In each note of music lives every tragedy of the world and every moment of its salvation. The cellist Pablo Casals knew this. Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.

—Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter

Though she was hopeless about pictures, and though she dressed so unevenly—oh, that cerise frock yesterday at church!—she must see some beauty in life, or she could not play the piano as she did. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.

—E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world that we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

—W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

—Anais Nin

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Only the note that says something essential has the right to exist.

—Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Chamber music--it is difficult to explain to anyone who doesn't understand of his own accord—is the right compromise between the ego and a profound recognition of the supreme importance of teamwork.

—Nathan Shaham, The Rosendorf Quartet

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those that witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

"People love each other for all sorts of different reasons," Roxane said. "Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do."
"But the other is better," Gen said.
Roxane pulled her feet into her chair and hugged her knees to her chest. "Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them."

—Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

We had been together only once, so my feelings for Ryuuichirou stopped at the smell of his hair and the sensation of the palms of his hands. Nothing more, and nothing less.

—Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita

Julien: You know... there were lots of things I was game for that you never said.
Sophie: Like?
Julien: Eating ants...insulting the unemployed...loving you like crazy.

And voila. That's how we won the game. Together...happy. And deep in concrete, we finally shared our childhood dream: the dream of a love without end.

—Jeux D'enfants

Faire et se taire.

—Gustave Flaubert

Listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go.

—e. e. cummings

Don't worry. The universe tends to unfold as it should.

—Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

and finally, the best advice on writing. ever.:

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn't write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I ask of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet," Letter One