Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Online Free Page B
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
row. Right. Yeah.
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
They talk about the patience scientists have to have, and how scientific work is 99 percent drudgery and repetition and neatness and making perfectly sure. And it is. I had a very good bio teacher last year, Miss Capswell and she and I did some lab work after school in spring term. We were working with bacteria. It was exactly the same thing Natalie was doing with the viola. Everything had to be right. You didn't know for sure what was going to happen when you finally did get it all right: you had to get it right to find out. Miss Capswell and I were trying to confirm an experiment reported in
Science
magazine last year. Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany two hundred and fifty years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.
That was maybe the most important thing that happened to me that dayâunderstanding that.
After about forty minutes of practicing, she started on a sticky fast part and fought with it for a while and got mad at it and went YAARKHH! on the strings and quit. She sat down on the rug too, and we talked. I told her what I had been thinking about music and thinking, and she liked it; but she asked didn't a scientist have to keep feeling out of his thinking, whereas in music they were the same thing. That didn't seem exactly right to me, but we couldn't figure out just what did happen in science. I told her about working with Miss Capswell and how neat it had been, because this was the first person I had ever met who just took it for granted you were interested in ideas. Working with her in the lab had been just about the first time in my life I didn't feel like an outsider, or self-conscious, or fake; and it was really because of that that I'd realized that no matter how I tried, I was never going to be an extravert, or popular, or one of the group, so I might as well quit trying. But Miss Capswell got transferred to another school over the summer, and when I came back in the fall, school was even worse than it had been before, in a way, because I wasn't even tormenting myself with trying to be part of it anymore, so there wasn't anything left at all. I didn't tell Natalie all that, that evening, of course. But we did talk some about school, about conformity and why it is hard to be different. She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be. Either to conform, or to obey. And that got me onto the car, and college, and my parents. She listened, and she understood perfectly about the car, but not so well about college. She said, "Well, OK, but you wouldn't actually give up going to the place where you belong, and go to a school you don't want? I mean, why?"
"Because they expect me to."
"But they expect wrong, don't they?"
"I don't know. There's money, too."
"There's loans and scholarships."
"There's a lot of competition."
"You're telling me!" she said, fairly sarcastically. "So you have to compete. All you can do is try, isn't it?"
She was hard to answer. But not the way my parents were. They were hard to answer because you could never get to the real point with them, and she was hard to answer because shed got there first. But at least she didn't leave me fighting a piece of phantom pot roast. Her mother brought us up some other kind of weird tea, and we talked some more, just sort of nothing, friendly talk; and at ten-thirty I left, figuring she might want to practice some more, because she'd said she tried to practice three hours a day. I drove around a few blocks and got home and went to bed. I was really tired. Like I'd walked a hundred miles. But the fog was gone. I went to bed and straight to sleep.
A LL THAT WAS
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
They talk about the patience scientists have to have, and how scientific work is 99 percent drudgery and repetition and neatness and making perfectly sure. And it is. I had a very good bio teacher last year, Miss Capswell and she and I did some lab work after school in spring term. We were working with bacteria. It was exactly the same thing Natalie was doing with the viola. Everything had to be right. You didn't know for sure what was going to happen when you finally did get it all right: you had to get it right to find out. Miss Capswell and I were trying to confirm an experiment reported in
Science
magazine last year. Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany two hundred and fifty years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.
That was maybe the most important thing that happened to me that dayâunderstanding that.
After about forty minutes of practicing, she started on a sticky fast part and fought with it for a while and got mad at it and went YAARKHH! on the strings and quit. She sat down on the rug too, and we talked. I told her what I had been thinking about music and thinking, and she liked it; but she asked didn't a scientist have to keep feeling out of his thinking, whereas in music they were the same thing. That didn't seem exactly right to me, but we couldn't figure out just what did happen in science. I told her about working with Miss Capswell and how neat it had been, because this was the first person I had ever met who just took it for granted you were interested in ideas. Working with her in the lab had been just about the first time in my life I didn't feel like an outsider, or self-conscious, or fake; and it was really because of that that I'd realized that no matter how I tried, I was never going to be an extravert, or popular, or one of the group, so I might as well quit trying. But Miss Capswell got transferred to another school over the summer, and when I came back in the fall, school was even worse than it had been before, in a way, because I wasn't even tormenting myself with trying to be part of it anymore, so there wasn't anything left at all. I didn't tell Natalie all that, that evening, of course. But we did talk some about school, about conformity and why it is hard to be different. She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be. Either to conform, or to obey. And that got me onto the car, and college, and my parents. She listened, and she understood perfectly about the car, but not so well about college. She said, "Well, OK, but you wouldn't actually give up going to the place where you belong, and go to a school you don't want? I mean, why?"
"Because they expect me to."
"But they expect wrong, don't they?"
"I don't know. There's money, too."
"There's loans and scholarships."
"There's a lot of competition."
"You're telling me!" she said, fairly sarcastically. "So you have to compete. All you can do is try, isn't it?"
She was hard to answer. But not the way my parents were. They were hard to answer because you could never get to the real point with them, and she was hard to answer because shed got there first. But at least she didn't leave me fighting a piece of phantom pot roast. Her mother brought us up some other kind of weird tea, and we talked some more, just sort of nothing, friendly talk; and at ten-thirty I left, figuring she might want to practice some more, because she'd said she tried to practice three hours a day. I drove around a few blocks and got home and went to bed. I was really tired. Like I'd walked a hundred miles. But the fog was gone. I went to bed and straight to sleep.
A LL THAT WAS
Readers choose
Stephen Measday
Susan Mallery
Hilary Green
Michael Jecks
Ruby Laska
Natalie Herzer
Laird Barron
Dave Barry
Frederick Ramsay