Well, I'll read something a little more cheerful than that.
I'll read a love poem.
Maybe some of you are young enough
that you can believe love is different than that.
This is an instrument-- a poem about a musical instrument
in a way, a lute.
I am perhaps now the world's worst living lutenist.
Back in the day in the Renaissance
when everybody played the lute, there probably
were people who play worse than I do,
but now, when only experts play, I've got a corner on it.
If you buy a guitar, or a lute, or any instrument that has
a wooden sounding board-- this is true of even a violin
or piano--
and you buy it as a new instrument,
you don't know too much at that point about what
it's matured voice will be like.
It's your business as performer of that instrument
to mature its voice.
You want to destroy a fine instrument
you buy it, put it in a case, put the case on the shelf.
In time, the wood dries out and loses
whatever potential for resonance it might have had.
And if it stays there long enough,
no one can ever fetch it back.
There's a story that the great Stradivari.
Stradivarius violins are so wonderful because they
were made with the wood from torn down churches which
had been vibrating for years and years
with all the choirs that sang.
I don't suppose that's true, but you know,
that's better than true, I mean that's truer than true.
If you have an instrument and you've treated it
with the affection and the respect that it deserved,
you'll have played it a lot in its first few years.
After its first few years, the worst danger
of cracking and warping is over.
So you take it back to a fine instrument maker,
and if it's a lute, you have something done called
regraduation of the face.
The face is the sounding board of the instrument
and up to this point, it will have
been fairly thick to prevent cracking as much as possible.
Now, you want to make it as thin and percussive as you dare,
so you take it back and the first thing you probably does
is-- because a lute has many strings, it begins at 11
and runs up to 24 or more, enormous tension there.
Probably the neck will have warped some
and the strings will be up to high off the fret board
and you can't play accurately, even as accurately as usual.
So you have-- you don't try to get rid
of that warp, that's part of the life of the wood that goes on
after the tree's dead.
But you must replane the neck and take it into account,
then you string up the instrument again.
And you have to leave it strung up
while you do this and the lute has a round belly,
and you must take that off.
The whole thing may fly apart when you--
too bad, lost your instrument, sir.
If it doesn't fly apart, then he begins regraduating the face
and playing all the time he's doing this
so he can measure that vibrancy.
He wants to make the face of the instrument
just as thin as he dares short of the point at which it
won't sustain sound.
You go too far and you've wrecked it that way,
but you get it down just as narrow as you dare.
If you own a fine lute, it is an astonishingly light instrument
and an unbelievably resonant responsive instrument.
You don't even need to sing to it, speak to it,
it answers you always.
"Regraduating the Lute."
"Having gathered power and resonance
through two years playing, the fingerboard
replaned to the warp of the living grain, then,
we are ready.
Keeping the strings tuned and under tension, we
gradually pare away while playing constantly.
All excess.
From behind the tempered face, the way, along grief,
hollows the cheeks away.
Not so much as might lose endurance to sustain a music.
Yet, until the sounding board is parchment thin
and the white bone structure.
Or a strong light would shine nearly
through until it trembles, to the least touch trembles,
to the latest song.
By hand, we slowly rub away the preserving brilliant varnish,
to a soft, old silver glow.
It's voice now is equal to any in the world.
We take it home to sing to, or lay it on the bed.
In any place, at any time I play, behind this face
where nobody can see, I have burned your name, to stay."