The sound of the Renaissance may suddenly ring out in the midst of medieval life.

           --Johann Huizinga

*

There are a lot of ways of being in the zone creatively, and not all of them have to do with making new work. Lately I can't seem to read anything without (figuratively) throwing up my arms and shouting, "Oh, my God, this is exactly it!" First, I bumped into the wonderful Virgil quotations, then the John Luther Adams ones, and now this Huizinga remark. All of them--every single one--has seemed pertinent to my current struggles with the manuscript of Vocation. For instance:

Too often I think of music only in terms of metaphor or image, forgetting the fundamental role of the body.

            —John Luther Adams

Of course. Yes. This matters so much to what I am trying to construct in this manuscript. In a letter yesterday, I told a friend, "I want the book to be a landscape of vocation—not in the sense of a topographical map but more in the sense of weather, or a Turner painting. Unity and fluidity. Is that even possible? Or readable?"