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.”