One writer whose essays I love to read (and whose novels I am just starting to read) is Zadie Smith. Though writers do very different things than classical musicians, there are some places where the two crafts, the two art forms, overlap and can be informed by the other.
Both writers and musicians are trying to create something that might be comparable to an ideal – whether it be external (as in the literature or music that already exists) or internal (the idea or sound inside the musician/writer that wants to be expressed). As a writer struggles to hone his voice so that he can most clearly express himself, so does a musician work to refine his skills so that he can put out into the world the way he hears a composer’s music.
In her essay “Fail Better,” Zadie Smith reminds the reader to remember “the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures….The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt….”
What freedom that allows! Who needs one more horn player? Who needs another rendition of a beloved piece? Does the world need another musical composition? And, while we’re at it, does the world need another blog post?
These are the wrong questions, I’m discovering. The world’s saturation level does not matter. Our involvement in the world is what matters – our attempts to communicate and find a voice, our attempts to understand each other, sharing in the great conversation of what it is to be human, what it is to live and die and love and participate in life.
I am choosing to believe there is room for all of our fractured shards.
(Thank you, Zadie Smith!)
