Rita ’s Reviews > Partita > Status Update

We all accumulate. Not junk but feelings. We hold onto stuff we’d be better off letting go of. [...] A grudge. Childhood fears, a teenage crush, everything that ever hurt you. I guess I always thought that was just being human. [...] blame, guilt, things I said or didn’t say, people I was mad at or that I thought were mad at me, that didn’t love me, or that I thought didn’t love me enough, but maybe they did.

The point of art is to help you like your life better.

Music could always help me find my feelings, had stood beside me at funerals, celebrated my joys, sat patiently with my loneliness. Not just mine, every person’s. It could reach inside them to find what they needed to say or cry or yell into the ears of a hard old world.

“When I’m playing, I’m not me anymore. I go inside the music and disappear in there.” [...] A feeling of having been erased from the world for a while. [...] it sounded like being drugged. [...] Not just high, bigger than that. The word I could think of, that seemed the right size, was joy. I told him he’d probably hit on the secret to why people like me kept doing it for such a lot of hours every day.

[A partita] is, a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods. [...] You’ll usually have a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow, sexy sarabande—the contrast is the point. The parts are all different, and the artist’s work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole.

Happiness is there for the taking, and so is grief, tenderness, hope, the wonder of lakes and mountains. Reach into that bottomless music box and pull out whatever medicine your day is wanting.

I’d loved music all my life, with that burning feeling I assumed other people must have when they wanted to get married.