A Quote by Anne Fadiman
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
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Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.
My parents once caught me conducting Beethoven's 'Fifth Symphony.'
I would never normally approach a woman in this way, but I couldn't help but notice that you have the eyes of a lady I was once desperately in love with. " "What a shame to love only once," she said, showing her white teeth in a wicked smile. "I've heard some men can manage twice or even more." I ignored her gibe. "I am only a fool once. Never will I love again.
She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.
You can chase a Beethoven symphony all your life and never catch up.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.
It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.
As the Little House settled down on her new foundation, she smiled happily. Once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars. Once again she could watch Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter come and go. Once again she was lived in and taken care of. Never again would she be curious about the city... Never again would she want to live there... The stars twinkled above her... A new moon was coming up... It was Spring... And all was quiet and peaceful in the country.
The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.
A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
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