still building

The trip to the US has been a good one. Among the many things i learnt, were lessons about building. Building a life, building a friendship, building a community, building a nation. From less than nothing, from scratch, from a mere wicker basket of clothes and precious mementos, brought across continents and oceans, in carts, in trains, in the steerage areas of ocean liners too large for comprehension.

It's just occurred to me, again, that this is a new opportunity for me to start building again. A fresh start. A chance for me to make, or mar. A friend pointed out her recent realisation that life never stays static. (Of course, we all know that, intellectually; but it takes an Incident, i think, to bring it home to where it actually makes a difference.) We're either building, or letting things fall apart, however slowly. And, inevitably, we have to choose which things to build, and which to let go. i suppose the difference between waste and fulfilment lies, then, in the wisdom of the choice.
...
...

Schubert: Impromptu in G flat major, D899 No. 3

This music crept by me upon the waters. Or, more accurately and less poetically, though not necessarily more truthfully - for the truth of the heart does not always accord with the facts - in a slightly stuffy room at the Royal Academy of Music in London on a brilliant summer morning in June. The pianist was a middle-aged Chinese woman with warm piercing eyes and a knowing smile in her voice.

The leaves of the plane tree just brushing against the window were luminous in the sun.

This music crept by me upon the waters on a golden London morning and has never quite left me since. So i'm putting it up here, played by none other than the legendary Horowitz - but then i don't think i'll ever hear another interpretation quite like that one. Not that it was better, objectively speaking, than Horowitz - but the truth of the heart does not always accord with the facts.


Note: 11 oct 2007

I've just heard this piece on radio, played by some pianist. It looks like I'm condemned to a lifetime of disappointment - nothing I hear is going to match up with that subtly intense rendition I heard on that golden day in London. Everyone else, even Horowitz, overdoes it - too much rubato, too much dynamic variation, too much, too much. What Patsy did right was that she kept the surface so still - everything took place beneath the surface, barely perceptible yet palpably present. Ours is such a culture of excess that most people can't appreciate the beauty of the terribly white. Sigh. We really should have recorded that performance, casual as the circumstances were.

...
...