Silence

    I have had to ask myself, why don’t I write about music? Is it because I spend a third of my waking hours practicing it and another third (or more) studying, presenting, debating, or performing it for class, professors, students, performance halls full of people?

“Music expresses that which cannot be said, but upon which it is impossible to remain silent.” –Alexandre Dumas

   Until something profound unfolds in my mind, I shall continue doing it instead of talking about it.

    But do consider how observant Dumas is…not only does music express something which the human tongue never could, but the expression itself is the kind that comes springing up like a fountain. A natural but also necessary expression, or else the very rocks would crack the disobedient silence.

Brave the Storyteller

“In the greatest fiction, the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is a free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery….” --Flannery O'Connor

This is precisely the problem with many Christian readers today, who should take this leaf from O’Connor and attempt at being good storytellers of their lives. But instead their “moral sense” is replaced with pietism, and viewing their faith and thus the patterns of their life through a lens of thou-shalt-nots they are blind as to what they actually do.

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it odes not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures…”