“... then some are hung up to staunch personal wounds. Then from a first-grader at Public School 234 on Chambers Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, as workers plunged: ‘The birds are on fire.’ While most politicians talk trash, many citizens recover words, songs, images. There are poems on the radio, requiems on campuses, extraordinary posters of ...”

“... these are cells of the wrong sort. I once heard a child at Chatsworth ask where the torture chambers were. Another thought occurs apropos the monastic life: what is it about music that encourages the non-performance of its duties? Musicians are notoriously unreliable and think nothing of sending someone else along to take their place. And so it has ...”