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.
Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.
The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.
There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
You want to say as little as you can and get the most punch out of it, always with the knowledge that people are not in the theater to listen to your music so much as to respond to the movie. You're a part of that experience.
It's weird when you see pieces of choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they are being done by another dance company.
The way a character looks reflects what's on the inside. I can make myself look really bad, and I can make myself look kind of gorgeous. It's not about me; it's about the character.
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