And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one.
I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a movie I'd seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me.
And it would pass.but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.Īt those times I would write to Naoko. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. “April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher they lose out on a certain element required or character building. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. you think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. There just happen to be people like that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that.
“I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me.
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