by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
A Ballade Before Breakfast
What did you do this morning? The novelist Anthony Burgess set himself the goal of "a thousand words before breakfast" — and wound up writing fifty-something books after the age of forty.
Alan Rusbridger played a Chopin ballade on the piano. Several mornings each week for several years, Rusbridger — the editor of the Guardian, and the executive intelligence behind two of the biggest journalistic scoops of our time: Wikileaks and Edward Snowden’s massive intelligence-share over the summer — staggered, bleary of eye, shaggy of hair, but obviously fully functional of brain, to a Fazioli 212:
So far this week, I’ve managed three twenty-minute morning sessions at the piano.
I get up half an hour earlier. I fit in ten minutes of yoga listening to the Today programme — not exactly meditative. Then breakfast and the papers with more Today programme all at the same time. Then I slip upstairs to the sitting room to play before driving into work …
I sit at the piano blocking out any subconscious fear of being overheard by the commuters walking to work in the street beyond or by Lindsay downstairs, or by our neighbor Gill through the party wall. I know Gill can, in fact, hear very well what I’m practising — but then she, too, notches up the hours on her piano and cello and we’re generally too polite to acknowledge that we’ve noticed. The light floods in at both ends of the quiet room. With luck the phone will stay silent for the next twenty minutes as I begin my little bubble of solitude before the day starts whirring away.
Rusbridger learned to play that ballade — the one in G minor — and learned “the answer to two questions”:
Is there time? And is it too late? Yes, there’s time — no matter how frantically busy one’s life. And the answer to the second question seems to be equally encouraging … Quite well into middle age, the brain is plastic enough to blast open hitherto unused neural pathways and adapt to new and complicated tasks. So no, it’s not too late.
Further proof that there is time and it isn’t too late: Rusbridger has written an involving and passionate book about the experience, called Play It Again.
