I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Derek WalcottRead
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
Interpretation
Musical composition is intricate and can be as abstract as modern art.
In this quote, Derek Walcott expresses the complexity of musical composition, drawing a parallel between music and abstract art. He suggests that just like a complex painting can evoke emotions and thoughts that may not be immediately clear, contemporary music can also possess layers of depth and intricacy that require careful listening and interpretation to fully appreciate.
In practice
During a lecture on contemporary art, this quote can be referenced to discuss the parallels between music and visual arts.
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.
I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.
I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.
In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.
So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.
It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.
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