I have passed through the academic valley of the shadow of death. It’s definitely good to be able to scratch things off the list; I feel free-er. One of the last things I read in one of my summer classes was a short story by James Baldwin entitled “Sonny’s Blues.” It was one of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time and I thought I’d share a particularly pleasing passage here.

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”