On the last day of summer, Jeremy Denk doesn’t try to sum up the past few months:
Go ahead and try to sum it all up. If I was working at the Whitney staging a retrospective of my summer past, the Summer of No Blogging …, it would mainly consist of a performance art piece entitled Practicing Maniac. Various rooms: always the same maniac.
Instead of looking back, try to imagine everything, a time forever:
Infinity is something you’re in awe of, which seems impossible, but (like a horizon) is there all the time, defining your every step. I find infinity not in Mozart’s continuity, but in his gaps, ambivalences, in glimpses, in the leap from one image or idea to another. If the cadence and the style is a box, a scaffolding, the four-bar phrases, the whole rigmarole of compositional framework … then music’s a box for holding infinities, momentary infinities. How do they fit in there? They’re hiding in the corners of phrases, behind barely touched-upon moments, which imply vast other things.
I like this. If you can squint enough to see the container, you might see infinity. As designers, and as people, we get hung up on the entirety of experiences, lasting experiences, but sometimes infinity is only a moment.
