“these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand” (20). “kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed” (20).… Continue reading

“Dan [Fred D. Hinger] showed me the importance of one note. His enthusiastic response to the sound of one touch was an explosion of well-being and positive reinforcing energy. He thoroughly understood how our energy and touch combine to influence the character of the sound we produce” (10). “Finding solutions–there are no limitations to the… Continue reading

“artifacts of chance” (39). “Given complete freedom, we tend to default to simple solutions, not because they are good, but because they are familiar” (47). “Because we are cognitive misers, breakthrough creativity happens when the easy and intuitive path is blocked—by choice or by force” (48). “Constraints push the brain beyond its default tendencies, forcing… Continue reading

“Anomalies are often the path to a new understanding.” “Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us… Continue reading

“After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colors and spaces which the artist has used and arranged.… Continue reading

“The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun, It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse. Just keep playing, mastering as you do the stepInto disorder this one meant. Don’t you see It’s all we… Continue reading

“No art, no melody, no time that is not bound up in some dark labor” (24). “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is” (28). “The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic, the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills… Continue reading

“The pursuit of fish creates an attentional focal point. It structures the way I look at the river—it gives me a goal, tells me what to look for, what to see” (29). “The real point is something larger, stranger, more mystical. You spend time on a river trying to catch fish, and you start noticing… Continue reading