The Wooden Box
While practicing, I stopped for a moment and looked at my piano. For some reason, at that instant, I no longer saw a musical instrument; I saw a wooden box.
I didn’t recognize it; my emotions didn’t respond; the relationship disappeared.
I couldn’t appreciate its function. I didn’t know its function; I didn’t care to know.
Its 300+ year-old legacy was reduced to a blip in time. All the past masters whom it served are dust. The current masters will be dust but not before they make an impression. And future generations will be mastering a highly evolved, unrecognizable and radical instrument.
My piano is a museum piece. And even still, it won’t last forever; it won’t survive duration.
The best thing one can hope for is that it will make our duration better.
That’s why I play music.
Nice one. Even if just for a short time, this post changed my perception– the feelings I get by looking at one of the most familiar objects in my life. What an interesting sensation.
I don’t really know the exactly what’s involved in this “better”-ness you write of that you hope from out of your wooden box, but I guess I feel something like it, too. Everything about our life is ephemeral, but music seems especially so. It’s still very mysterious to me, exactly what it is about music that has kept me circling back to it no matter what else happens in my life.