expressions of my own. Very true it is (and who escapes it?) that we experience the world through the filter of our own personality; or, in the psychological terms of one school of psychology, we “project” our own traits onto others, and rarely experience people as they are in themselves….
And yet? How could anything other be possible?
Anne Sexton: “Yes, it is my nature to be apprehensive almost constantly, and my hunger for love is as immense as your eating people in Wonderland . * When I feel the antithesis, I do not know how to get enjoyment out of it, although it is part of life and as a writer I should enjoy being in touch with agony.”
Incomprehensible differences of personality. Early childhood? Biochemical destiny? “Roles”…? For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.
“In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands.”—Marcus Aurelius
Many individuals, many possibilities of “ways out.” To each according to his taste, his choice, his intellect…his courage. But at bottom the taboo of suicide is, I suspect, merely irritation and resentment on the part of those left behind. Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
November 19, 1974. Fragments of past selves, unbelievable in the present. Not recallable. Where is the person—loosely known as “me”—who played piano for so many hours?—daily? A kind of pleasantly demonic sinking into it—into that elusive “it” of music—which unfortunately evaporates as soon as one ceases to concentrate. And the frustrations, the desire for technical perfection—perfection!—one would have liked simply a casual kind of proficiency—unoffensive to the ear and the brain. But music was ultimately elusive, immediately elusive, and as the years passed I worked at it less and less, till finally not at all, not even once with any seriousness since we’ve moved here to Windsor…and the good trim handsome neat proper piano remains in the corner of the living room, forever silent…. How to believe that I had really worked at it so hard…how to accept the fact that that “self” is gone forever…that I am able to listen seriously, with concentration, to so few composers now…as if music, musics, were an island being nibbled at by the sea, worn away constantly, till all that remains is music of what might be called a higher consciousness…. Ravel and Debussy, of course, always, but apart from them it’s primarily religious music we listen to, and listen to, without being aware of this music being “religious” and perhaps not knowing what that term really means. All the works one might expect—Bach, Fauré, Mozart, Beethoven (though less of Beethoven than once), etc., etc., and unusual works like Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.”…This is the music I could never have played, could never have attempted; perhaps I gave up playing piano because it was totally beyond me, the sounds I really wanted to hear, and the necessity for my creating them not very important. After all, when there are so many gifted musicians…?
Contemporary music, experimental and non-traditional:
And yet? How could anything other be possible?
Anne Sexton: “Yes, it is my nature to be apprehensive almost constantly, and my hunger for love is as immense as your eating people in Wonderland . * When I feel the antithesis, I do not know how to get enjoyment out of it, although it is part of life and as a writer I should enjoy being in touch with agony.”
Incomprehensible differences of personality. Early childhood? Biochemical destiny? “Roles”…? For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.
“In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands.”—Marcus Aurelius
Many individuals, many possibilities of “ways out.” To each according to his taste, his choice, his intellect…his courage. But at bottom the taboo of suicide is, I suspect, merely irritation and resentment on the part of those left behind. Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
November 19, 1974. Fragments of past selves, unbelievable in the present. Not recallable. Where is the person—loosely known as “me”—who played piano for so many hours?—daily? A kind of pleasantly demonic sinking into it—into that elusive “it” of music—which unfortunately evaporates as soon as one ceases to concentrate. And the frustrations, the desire for technical perfection—perfection!—one would have liked simply a casual kind of proficiency—unoffensive to the ear and the brain. But music was ultimately elusive, immediately elusive, and as the years passed I worked at it less and less, till finally not at all, not even once with any seriousness since we’ve moved here to Windsor…and the good trim handsome neat proper piano remains in the corner of the living room, forever silent…. How to believe that I had really worked at it so hard…how to accept the fact that that “self” is gone forever…that I am able to listen seriously, with concentration, to so few composers now…as if music, musics, were an island being nibbled at by the sea, worn away constantly, till all that remains is music of what might be called a higher consciousness…. Ravel and Debussy, of course, always, but apart from them it’s primarily religious music we listen to, and listen to, without being aware of this music being “religious” and perhaps not knowing what that term really means. All the works one might expect—Bach, Fauré, Mozart, Beethoven (though less of Beethoven than once), etc., etc., and unusual works like Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.”…This is the music I could never have played, could never have attempted; perhaps I gave up playing piano because it was totally beyond me, the sounds I really wanted to hear, and the necessity for my creating them not very important. After all, when there are so many gifted musicians…?
Contemporary music, experimental and non-traditional:
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