Learning to be alone
A few scattered thoughts, since I’ve been dealing with windows installs gone wrong. I never thought I’d live to see the day when an install of linux worked perfectly on a laptop, but windows becomes borked beyond repair. Or perhaps I’ve had incredibly good luck, with as many windows boxes I get to reinstall in one semester.
In my surfing, I came across this article by Belinda Reynolds. She makes a lot of good points, and ones I often fall into myself. She speaks of a quality of time–one in which the mind is allowed to open and not work according to a set (slightly neurotic) schedule. Of course composers need to be aware of things like deadlines in a wider sense, but the actual act of composition is one that needs a quality of time to develop and work. That’s something I needed to hear, while having to cram time for composition in the hours I’m not working.
And with her article, at times I wonder if Thomas Merton didn’t write New Seeds of Contemplation with composers in mind:
“Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and beyond all desire, a fufillment whose limits extend to infinity.” (81)
