Something from a real writer
"The Piano"
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
"I still have the Baldwin baby grand piano my parents gave me as a high school graduation present decades ago. All through my adult life, every time I moved I took it with me—no easy feat with a piano so large—or else found it a suitable temporary lodging. The piano has accompanied me from Brooklyn to Philadelphia to Boston and is now settled in Manhattan, where it occupies a good part of the living room. Once I went to Italy for a year, and for that year I asked my sister to shelter it. When I returned I found a few paper clips lodged inside among the strings and I heatedly accused my sister of not taking proper care of the piano, which in retrospect seems an odd overreaction on my part: just a few clips, after all.
It’s not clear to me why I’ve held on to the piano for so long and continue to play it, considering that I no longer play well, nor, to be candid, with much enthusiasm. It’s not that I love it so much. I hardly love it at all at this point. (This has nothing to do with loving music. I listen to music as much as ever and am enchanted by fine pianists. It’s only my own playing that has ceased to enchant me.)
The piano is a handsome piece of furniture, a warm cherry wood, still fairly sleek and shiny—it would be even shinier if I polished it—and impressive, especially when the lid is opened to its full extension. But beauty alone can’t account for my inability to let it go. I find it hard, in general, to stop doing anything enjoyable once I’ve started, which is one reason I’ve never tried hard drugs: I know what would happen. Habit, as Proust noted, is the most constricting of traps. Playing the piano is a benign, not dangerous or illegal habit, but even so, in my case it has gone on far too long; the habit has outlived the enjoyment it once yielded. Luckily my living room is large enough to accommodate the old piano, yet every so often I gaze at it in all its grandeur and imagine to what better uses I might put that space..."
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
"I still have the Baldwin baby grand piano my parents gave me as a high school graduation present decades ago. All through my adult life, every time I moved I took it with me—no easy feat with a piano so large—or else found it a suitable temporary lodging. The piano has accompanied me from Brooklyn to Philadelphia to Boston and is now settled in Manhattan, where it occupies a good part of the living room. Once I went to Italy for a year, and for that year I asked my sister to shelter it. When I returned I found a few paper clips lodged inside among the strings and I heatedly accused my sister of not taking proper care of the piano, which in retrospect seems an odd overreaction on my part: just a few clips, after all.
It’s not clear to me why I’ve held on to the piano for so long and continue to play it, considering that I no longer play well, nor, to be candid, with much enthusiasm. It’s not that I love it so much. I hardly love it at all at this point. (This has nothing to do with loving music. I listen to music as much as ever and am enchanted by fine pianists. It’s only my own playing that has ceased to enchant me.)
The piano is a handsome piece of furniture, a warm cherry wood, still fairly sleek and shiny—it would be even shinier if I polished it—and impressive, especially when the lid is opened to its full extension. But beauty alone can’t account for my inability to let it go. I find it hard, in general, to stop doing anything enjoyable once I’ve started, which is one reason I’ve never tried hard drugs: I know what would happen. Habit, as Proust noted, is the most constricting of traps. Playing the piano is a benign, not dangerous or illegal habit, but even so, in my case it has gone on far too long; the habit has outlived the enjoyment it once yielded. Luckily my living room is large enough to accommodate the old piano, yet every so often I gaze at it in all its grandeur and imagine to what better uses I might put that space..."
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