Circa 1975, a elderly piano teacher on Long Island was trying to guide a not-very-talented pupil, on the cusp of adolescence, through the Largo of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The teacher, who had been a displaced person and refugee during World War Two, had seen and endured unspeakable things before coming to America. Although she had confided some of her story to the boy’s parents, her profoundly callow protege knew none of it. With rote repetition, he had mostly grasped the technical side of the piece — at least in the simplified version that had been placed in front of him.
But the teacher prodded, “there is so little feeling in how you play,” as the boy fumbled the aching pathos of the melody.
“What am I supposed to feel?” the child asked, with an innocence that was as guileless as it was vapid.
She paused, then said, “imagine this. You are a very old man, looking back on a long life. And that life has been so full of suffering and heartbreak that you think, ‘if there had been any way, years ago, to know what was ahead of me and how hard it would be, I would never have continued.’ But the old man also thinks, ‘if I had known those things and made such a decision, I would have been wrong. Because the few moments of happiness and beauty have made the rest worth bearing. In a way that I could never have understood, even if I had seen the future, the scales have balanced.'”
Only half-understanding, the boy said, “so I should be happy about what I don’t know?”
Breaking into a smile replete with sadness and wisdom, the teacher answered, “something like that. Now please let us begin again.” And the child, conjuring himself as an old man, reflecting on blessings so deeply disguised that they would come into focus only decades after the fact, felt the music come to life at his fingertips, with all of its poignant longing.
When he finished, the teacher gazed at him silently for a moment. Then, looking away, she said, “that will be sufficient for today.”
Decades later, the boy had seasoned into reluctant manhood, and recalled the teacher to his father, near the end of the latter’s time in this world. Remembering the woman, by then long gone, his father reflected, “it is always people with least reason to be grateful and the most reason to be bitter who are the least bitter and most grateful.”
Seizing on the irony, he added, “and the opposite is true. The people who have so much to appreciate and so little to be angry about are always the least happy and the most miserable.”
“So if you want to be happy,” the father cautioned his son, “never stop trying to break that rule. Chase after reasons to be thankful and slough off any justification you think you have to complain. Get even with everybody who has ever helped you, and forget about all the rest.”
Not long afterward, the father was gone. In clearing out his possessions, the son found a volume by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with this passage underlined: “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
If we may propose an invocation for tomorrow’s feast, it would be this: take the old man’s advice and break that rule. Be guided by Bonhoeffer’s prescription for living richly. Heed the teacher, and please let us begin again. Find ways to believe that your scales have more than balanced. And that will be sufficient for today.
Matthew Fenton
painting by Norman Rockwell