a new jewel box. C. For collection…
Always be on the
lookout for the
presence of
wonder.
-E.B.White
Four of us, two from one coast, two from the other, who regularly zoom to make art “together,” met in real life in Philadelphia to to enjoy some art museum exhibits and to share food, wine, and talk.
Ode to Joy flash mob. Music brings people together.
Excerpt: One autumn day in 1822, the fifty-two-year-old composer put on his moth-eaten coat and set out for what he intended as a short morning walk in the city, his mind a tempest of ideas. Walking had always been his primary laboratory for creative problem-solving, so the morning stroll unspooled into a long half-conscious walk along the Danube. In a classic manifestation of the self-forgetting that marks the intense creative state now known as “flow,” Beethoven lost track of time, of distance, of the demands of his own body.
He walked and walked, hatless and absorbed, not realizing how famished and fatigued he was growing, until the afternoon found him wandering disheveled and disoriented in a river basin far into the countryside. There, he was arrested by local police for “behaving in a suspicious manner,” taken to jail as “a tramp” with no identity papers, and mocked for claiming that he was the great Beethoven — by then a national icon, with a corpus of celebrated concertos and sonatas to his name, and eight whole symphonies.