“Renaissance”

“Renaissance serenaded me in that stuffy attic. I stood by myself, with feet on the ground and soul flitting up and away. The song carried me to another age and to a finer way of approaching the world. It showed me crystalline life, life glinting and translucent, life fashioned by artistic hands. The music danced into my attic with the stately grace of a pavane. It pirouetted in gemmed velvet and laced gorget. It carried me to England, to a time seven centuries earlier. As I stood motionless with eyes closed, swept up by “Carpet of the Sun,” my soul received an imprint of my state of consciousness at that precise moment. This imprint would remain with me over the course of my life. Its core lay in the organizing motif of the music, but the impression included the first freedom of life I was just then experiencing after sixteen uninterrupted years of schooling, the purifying isolation of the wooded land around Homer’s Pond and the galvanic stimulus of the Dostoevsky novel in whose pages I enjoyed losing myself. My soul was stretching itself up and out. I had begun to write short descriptive pieces; I found myself able to probe deeply into the literature I perused. My days were spent in thoroughgoing isolation: I might as well have been living in a cave in the Himalayas for all the human contact I had. And the music! The music played directly on my soul, teaching it, guiding it, and expanding its dimensions.”