Adrienne Rich - Transcendental Etude lyrics
[Adrienne Rich - Transcendental Etude lyrics]
No one ever told us we
Had to study our lives
Make of our lives a study
As if learning natural history
Or music, that we should begin
With the simple exercises first
And slowly go on trying
The hard ones, practicing till strength
And accuracy became one with the daring
To leap into transcendence, take the chance
Of breaking down the wild arpeggio
Or faulting the full sentence of the fugue
–And in fact we can’t live
Like that: we take on
Everything at once before we’ve even begun
To read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
In the midst of the hard movement
The one already sounding as we are born
Had to study our lives
Make of our lives a study
As if learning natural history
Or music, that we should begin
With the simple exercises first
And slowly go on trying
The hard ones, practicing till strength
And accuracy became one with the daring
To leap into transcendence, take the chance
Of breaking down the wild arpeggio
Or faulting the full sentence of the fugue
–And in fact we can’t live
Like that: we take on
Everything at once before we’ve even begun
To read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
In the midst of the hard movement
The one already sounding as we are born