I welcomed each pregnancy with thanksgiving. To feel life within my womb, little hands and feet tapping from within, this is extraordinary. Then the births. I entered into each one of them, feeling the crescendo of pain until it became so strong I felt I could not survive. In a way, I saw it like death. Prayer came easy.
~ from CIRCLING TO THE CENTER by Susan M. Tiberghien
Nadia Boulanger once described a Menuhin recital: He gave a number of encores, and the last was the slow movement of Brahm's Sonata in D minor. What happened then was part of an indescribable completeness. The whole house found itself in the grip of the same mute emotion, which created silence of an extraordinary quality. Everyone understood, felt, participated in what he himself must have been feeling." Menuhin has always possessed this quality. Even as a child, his playing had an innate innocence (which is still intact) that made Einstein declare that, hearing him play, he knew there was a God.
