In one of his sketchbooks for The Rite of Spring, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky writes: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse."
This quote from Stravinsky reminds me of one of my favorite poems/addresses by American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Man the Reformer
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life?
Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason.
If there are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life.
(from Nature: Addresses and Lectures)
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