The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the transformative power of music and its ability to create new experiences in our lives.
Wendell Berry's quote speaks to the profound impact that music can have on individuals and communities. When music is present, it has the ability to transport us to new realms of existence, imbue our emotions with depth, and connect us to a shared reality that transcends the ordinary. It suggests that during its presence, music not only entertains but also reshapes our perceptions and enriches our lives, creating a temporary yet significant world of its own.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of arts education, one might say, 'As Wendell Berry reminds us, the music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me.
The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play.
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
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