Adversaria (40)
‘If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found’ —Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, 47%)
‘We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of’ —Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, 60%)
‘RC: What is your feeling now about the use of music as accompaniment to recitation (Persephone)?
IS: Do not ask. Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.’ —Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft (p. 38)
‘Some people achieve a kind of immortality just by the totality with which they do or do not possess some quality or characteristic. Rachmaninov’s immortalizing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 55)
‘Most artists are sincere anyway and most art is bad – though of course, some insincere art (sincerely insincere) is quite good. One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous, however, as one’s conviction that one is right’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 120)
‘After fifty years it is quite impossible to discriminate between memories personal and impersonal; all memories are personal, yet mine are removed so far from the person that they cannot be told otherwise than impersonally’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 187)