In my Commonplace...

"And ballet, I wasn't going to mention ballet because I don't know any more about it that I do these other arts, even less-- but my wife and I went to Saratoga...and we saw the City Ballet do a couple of wonderful dances, one on Bach's Goldberg Variations. And I realized this art is working in both time and space. It's both music and it's spacial on the stage, and it's saying listen to this time, right now and look, look at what you're looking at, look at the language the body speaks, the language the face speaks, the language the hands speak, these wonderful things the young, supple, beautiful bodies are doing up there on the stage to the music. These are the kind of things we all of us do less young-ly, less supple-y, less beautifully, but with our hands, with our bodies -- pay attention to that. So generally -- and this is not a complicated point, God knows -- the arts frame our life for us so that we will experience it. Pay attention to it."  Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary