in his introduction of Huan-Ching Chou, who was about to perform Bach's Toccata in G major, BWV 916, at a Piano Evenings performance this week David Dubal used these words of J. M. Coetzee from Diary of a Bad Year.

The best proof we have that life is good and that therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all who has our welfare at heart is that to each of us on the day we are born comes to us the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited. It comes to us for free. How I would like to speak just once to that man, dead now these many years. I would say “See how we in the twenty-first century still play your music, how we revere and love it, and how we are absorbed and moved by it and fortified and made joyful by it.” I would say to him “In the name of all mankind, please accept these words of tribute, inadequate though they are, and let all that you endured in those bitter last years of yours, including the cruel surgical operations on your eyes, be forgotten.”

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

quoted by Rebecca Solnit in The Beginning Comes After the End

From a story in The New York Times

Well, let’s back up just a minute. My grandmother — my beloved grandmother, who’s like a third parent to me — had a saying that when somebody gets older, they don’t really change; they just become more so. In other words, whatever is their disposition — kind, they become kinder. Cantankerous, they become more ornery. And you just see this progression with Trump. He is just becoming more of what he’s been for a long time. And at some point, you become so much more, you almost tip over into alternate realities. And this is one thing that will never cease to amaze me: the independent standard by which he is judged. If anyone else in politics was doing any of this, you would really start to wonder, are they OK? I mean, is this person OK, right?

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

— H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) Via Philosophy Quotes

I just spent half an hour reading some notes I made long ago, most likely in my last two year in college, It must have been my first time through many books that I have revisited and treasure. One note that surprised me is from Bernard Malamud's The Fixer.

Freedom exists in the cracks of the state. Keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Now that feels like a warning from the past.