For All My Failings
For all my failings, I’m pretty proud of the life I’ve lived. I have at least lived up to my desire to seek out new and interesting experiences and to avoid the stable path of mediocrity.
Chopin
Chopin — one searches in vain for more delicate music than Chopin’s. And this is what unfailingly ceases to amaze me about Chopin: in another, his pervasive chromaticism would have sounded like agression and the pent-up rage of one dispossessed. Yet in Chopin, it seems required for his purpose — for his absence of direction. [...]