The Path

About 100,000 years ago I must certainly have been related to swans and wild geese, because I feel so drawn towards them.
----To Jussi Jalas, 24th August 1940

Faith, like a bird, sees its trackless way, unaided by the intellect.

----Farid.

A white sheet of paper is full of ways.

Old people have walked down the path so often that it ceases to be a path-and they, themselves, have become invisible. V.S.P's.'Life at 80' is sublime on this. Dying people see it. Theirs is a late style . The threads of time become the curves of time.

'Architecture for me has always begun with drawing. When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since. The buildings do appear on paper the way you say, but they are not the result of gratuitous brushstrokes. The pencil is guided by so many thoughts stored away in my mental library. But, when I have looked at the site for a building, considered its budget and thought of how it might be built, and what it might be, the drawings come very quickly. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say...

When people ask me if I take pleasure in the idea of someone looking at my buildings in the future, I tell them that this person will vanish, too. Everything has a beginning and an end. You. Me. Architecture. We must try to do the best we can, but must remain modest. Nothing lasts for very long...'

Right angles separate and divide. Personally, I have always loved curves, which are an essential feature of the natural world. It is not easy to draw curves, to give them the spontaneity they demand and then to organize them in space in such a way as to achieve the visual architectural effect that one is looking for. Like Matisse, I maintain that my curves are not gratuitous; they have a meaning. At one point, even Le Corbusier, who had proclaimed the virtues of right angles, began to despise them. In the end he admitted that we were right. One day he said to me: What you do is baroque, but you do it very well. You have the mountains of Rio in your eyes.'

----Oscar Niemeyer (still working at the age of 100!)

From the New Yorker:

Sibelius, For an instant God opens up his door and His orchestra plays the fifth symphony.

The 8th, started in 1924, remains uncompleted even though he worked on it up until the time of his death, 1957. Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can't go on like this.

He burns his manuscripts. What must it be like to lose one's work like this (Huxley?). Is there a desire to be unknown, to not be named, that rivals the desire to be an immortal, a star that resists the withering hand of time? Remember, he comes from the outskirts. The human scale of the other, smaller, marginal Europe (Kundera)

Rachmaninoff: I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

'The Finns are descendants of an errant tribe'. Mahler: The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing. Sibelius: A confession of faith at different stages of one's life.

The 5th: repetition of themes with small variations. 'Music becomes a search for meaning with an open-ended structure-an analogue to the spiritual life.

2nd movement: the swan hymn: 16 swans flying over Ainola: One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon..That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider..nothing in the whole world affects me-nothing in art, literature, or music-in the same way as do these swans and wild geese and cranes. Their voices and being.

'The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce the theme..it's as if they had always been playing it, and the listener had only begun to hear it. Its intervals split wide open, shatter and re-form.

The symphony ends with six far-flung chords , through which the main theme shoots like a pulse of energy. The swan becomes the sun.'

Three days before his death he would walk in the forest, awaiting the return of the cranes, hoping to relive that moment. To be a radical in this day and age is to be a conservative, to retrace ancient byways, to draw invisible lines. Even if the path cannot be discerned any more, still it is worth living just to know that it once existed, that it was open for each one of us, and that for time out of mind you and I have glimpsed it and gasped at such a spectacular vision.

Their cries echo throughout my being. One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away....