Sympathy for the Snail
About a year or so ago I decided to make a serious effort to sight-read at the piano. I'd been playing for decades, but never really learned to sight-read. So I bought a bunch of baby books and stacked them on the piano, and every day I would take one from the top, put it on the rack, and stumble haltingly through it.
I'm glad to tell you that I still stumble haltingly through them, but a little faster these days, and I stumble haltingly with more confidence and assurance, if that makes sense. Things like this take a long time, and I often think of that exquisitely cruel haiku by Issa, "O snail, climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly." When it comes to the piano, I know how that snail feels.
But even as you slowly, slowly progress, there are compensations. One of my baby books is Anton Diabelli's Op. 125, "The First Lessons on the Piano." Just now I was playing the last piece and at the end there's a moment of real lyrical sweetness. It's simple stuff, but still affecting, and for a moment I had a reverie where the player and the listener in me became people from another world. There was a middle-aged man, a middle-class fellow somewhere in mid-19th-century central Europe, and it was mid-morning, so he was dressed in vest and frock coat and the whole deal. And his little daughter was playing the piano, and she got through the whole piece that I had just played without a mistake and turned to him and smiled. And he smiled back, and thought to himself that if only such moments could last forever, that would be all the heaven he could ever ask for. It was all imaginary, there was nothing going vaguely like that, it was just me, sitting at the piano in T-shirt and sweat pants, and the cat looking out the window with the sun rising above the rooftops to the east. But the gentle, melting tenderness of the music still hung in the air.
And I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that if the snail climbs diligently, it will certainly notice that with a year's effort behind it, the view has improved quite a bit. It's the kind of thing that keeps you going. And now I'm going to have a bite of breakfast and get back to that piano.
I'm glad to tell you that I still stumble haltingly through them, but a little faster these days, and I stumble haltingly with more confidence and assurance, if that makes sense. Things like this take a long time, and I often think of that exquisitely cruel haiku by Issa, "O snail, climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly." When it comes to the piano, I know how that snail feels.
But even as you slowly, slowly progress, there are compensations. One of my baby books is Anton Diabelli's Op. 125, "The First Lessons on the Piano." Just now I was playing the last piece and at the end there's a moment of real lyrical sweetness. It's simple stuff, but still affecting, and for a moment I had a reverie where the player and the listener in me became people from another world. There was a middle-aged man, a middle-class fellow somewhere in mid-19th-century central Europe, and it was mid-morning, so he was dressed in vest and frock coat and the whole deal. And his little daughter was playing the piano, and she got through the whole piece that I had just played without a mistake and turned to him and smiled. And he smiled back, and thought to himself that if only such moments could last forever, that would be all the heaven he could ever ask for. It was all imaginary, there was nothing going vaguely like that, it was just me, sitting at the piano in T-shirt and sweat pants, and the cat looking out the window with the sun rising above the rooftops to the east. But the gentle, melting tenderness of the music still hung in the air.
And I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that if the snail climbs diligently, it will certainly notice that with a year's effort behind it, the view has improved quite a bit. It's the kind of thing that keeps you going. And now I'm going to have a bite of breakfast and get back to that piano.
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