Eastman School

I'm sitting in the main hall of ESM, hoping to run into this kid I know who's auditioning today. He studied with the same viola teacher in high school as I did. She told him that he ought to ask me some questions and whatnot--just the kind of thing that you're supposed to do when you audition for a school or consider going somewhere. I didn't find it useful to hear about school situations from other people when I was in that situation, because I expected that no one would feel exactly the way that I would in the given situations.

I remember when I came here for my audition. It was the first time I had been to NY since my grandmother died. Katie chaperoned me... we landed in Rochester on Thursday the... ninth(?) of February, 2006. Two days from now marks two years since my audition. That day feels important now. I wish I could write it--but there isn't a great deal to write about it. It was snowing... I was nervous the whole time... I felt free and in my place for the first time in a very long time... I felt a feeling similar to what I had felt when I went to the Governor's School to audition. I had never wanted anything so badly. What I wish I could write was looking out the window of Sibley down at the street as it snowed and feeling that I wanted nothing more than to be here. I liked knowing that there were people here doing things like writing new music and practicing to produce a singular product. It was the organization and consistency and the singularity and the psycho-intellectual beauty combined with the foreignness and yet familiarity of life as an 18-to-20-something that caught me. Seeing Zach in his element, knowing the things these people were doing, their relationships, the flawlessness... something cliche like that.

But I know that it isn't like that--that is what I imagined it was because that is what I wanted it to be. It's mostly just confusing and superficial what they do here. There is no beautiful understanding to be learned in this place as it is today. You can't grow flowers in a factory so dirty.

"... As for your principle that the truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part. However, it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is -not- 4; does that make it true? On the other hand, is it really so difficult simply to accept everything that one has been brought up on and that has gradually struck deep roots--what is considered truth in the circle of one's relatives and of many good men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates man? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one's feelings and even one's conscience, proceeding often without any consolation, but ever with the eternal goal of the true, the beautiful, and the good?" An excerpt from a letter Nietzsche wrote to his sister in 1865, appearing in The Portable Nietzsche, translation by Walter Kaufmann.