She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the profound and often hidden connection people have with art and music, suggesting that true understanding comes from deep emotional resonance rather than intellectual analysis.
In this quote, Charles De Lint expresses the idea that music and art can resonate deeply within an individual, even if they have never consciously encountered it before. This suggests that our experiences of beauty and meaning often stem from an internal wellspring of knowledge and emotion, waiting to be discovered when the conditions are right. The interplay of faith and doubt in engaging with art is emphasized, highlighting the complex nature of artistic appreciation as something that transcends mere rationality.
In practice
During a discussion about the transformative power of music in a lecture.
The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.
Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums—and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused - hence all the old tales of elfin kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. That is a lie. All they require is our recognition.
I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.
We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.
When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else
I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.
There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
When someone picks up one of my songs and records it, I'm a flattered man, it's a blessing to me
I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.
Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.
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