A life without tragedy would not be worth living.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'