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The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these memories condition what we may term our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand upon its apex.
- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
The practice of the ordinary may be thought of as the overcoming of iteration or replication or imitation by repetition, of counting by recounting, of calling by recalling. It is the familiar invaded by another familiar. Hence ordinary language procedures, like the procedures of psychoanalysis, inherently partake of the uncanny.
-Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America
Prelude (Moderato): "Late sunlight burning the edges of a cloud"
"I COULD READ music, as I recall it, before I could read words. . . ." (Stanley Cavell, 2002 Berkeley interview)
"Musical training," Socrates observes to Glaucon in the Republic, "is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the innermost places of the soul." (Benjamin Jowett, translator)
"The source of sound stimulus is responsible for the pitch or manifestation of a certain sound." (Anna T. Carilli, The Realm of Musical Sound, 1937)
"The placement of the notes on the staff will determine their pitch. The music alphabet is seven letters long starting on 'a' and ending on 'g' and extends itself repeatedly." (Carilli)
"Each note may be raised by one half step by a sharp (#) or lowered one half step by a flat ([musical flat])'.' (Carilli)
"In philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference." (Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, 2003, and variously)
"Music is feeling, then, not sound." (Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier")
Cavell's first explicit excursion into autobiography in 1994 was titled A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Earlier, the opening chapter of The World Viewed of 1971 was titled "An Autobiography of Companions."
"The trauma of the birth of culture in oneself," Cavell offers in A Pitch . . . , "the sure knowledge that there is a life of art and of the mind,...