"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
“Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.”
Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles
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Charles Rosen 69
American pianist and writer on music 1927–2012Related quotes
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 174
Context: Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.
“He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future.”
Source: Think (1999), Chapter Six, Reasoning, p. 225
Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18.
Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 62
“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
"The Holy Dimension", p. 333
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)