An Overture: Awakening to the Arts

The Song of the Lark

"It was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the old miseries and sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide staircase to the pictures . . . . But in that same room there was a picture -- oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her. That was a picture indeed. She liked even the name of it, 'The Song of the Lark'....She told herself that that picture was 'right.' Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain. But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture."

~ Willa Cather

Without question, Cather's Song of the Lark remains one of my favorite books. And it is because of this severe enthusiasm for the arts that I, like Thea (Cather's protagonist), exist. The finest of Cather's novels, Song of the Lark explores the experience of a young girl's awakening to the the arts. This blog serves merely as a medley of musings for which I have great heart; I was not awake, was not even fully human, until I learned of belles-lettres and all that is beautiful and good aesthetically, philosophically, intellectually.

Without intellectual stimulation and hope, I am nothing. With this intellectual stimulation, I have an appreciation for beauty, for life, for learning, for all that is good in this world.