Honeybees and Distant Thunder

Even if a person experiences enviable peaks of happiness, a fulfilled life, all happiness still carries with it the loneliness inherent in being human.

Music always had to be of the now. It couldn't just be something preserved in a museum, and it was meaningless unless it was alive in the present. If you were satisfied with merely unearthing a lovely fossil, then music became no more than a relic from the past.

People labelled as geniuses had their own problems. No one knew how their life would work out. So many prodigies had been toyed with by fate. The world was littered with tragic, fallen stars.

What a strange thing music was. It was just one small individual up there performing, and the notes created by those fingers were here one moment and gone the next. Yet what was there was almost the definition of the eternal. The wonderment of a living creature, with a finite life, creating the eternal. Through that fleeting, transient moment of music, one was in touch with eternity.

What kind of job was it to be a musician? What sort of vocation was it, anyway? Vocation - that was the perfect word for it. It really was a calling, a living calling. It didn't fill your stomach, didn't last. To devote your life to something like that, the only way you could describe it was as a calling.

The highest form of human achievement was music. Human beings might have dirty, repulsive aspects to them, but out of the sordid swamp that was humanity - no, it was precisely because of this chaotic swamp - the beautiful lotus flower of music would bloom.