One life must be enough
Friday, June 8, 2007 at 12:26AM When I wrote this week's Sunday Scribblings musings on Town & Country, I was thinking of something that Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine wrote in a little booklet called Northern Spy Number One: Crawl Low Under Smoke. I couldn't find it at the time, but found a portion of it copied in my journal from June 1997. He says it so beautifully:
One life is hardly enough. I've had to kill so many lives to be alive in this one. The college professor life. The life lived in the South with the brave dancing words full of sweet storm clouds, grace and the reign of laughter. And me struggling with a first collection of short stories.
The life on the Northeast Ohio farm with mist like the secret birthing night breath of angels coming up off the five a.m. fields and the grey birds praising the new coming day in their secret symphonic language, full of mercy and foreshadowing. The life of the pianist braving The Well-Tempered Clavier, making the Mozart glimmer with purity, getting the warm fire of the Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes and Etudes under the palms of miracle hands, making Ravel's impressionist poems come in and out of focus, breathing all the while.
The young are apple trees. We prune off many limbs so that we might bear a little fruit. One life must be enough, but damn. (p. 18)
Yes, Linford, yes. Damn.
