So, I can’t remember when I started doing this as it’s become a kind of tradition whose beginnings time forgot, but whenever I sense I’m coming close to writing a double bar to something I’m working on, be it a single movement, a single song, or an entire piece, I always make sure there’s an unopened bottle of wine somewhere in the house.
The past few days I could sense that a day was rapidly approaching, so I made sure to have an unopened bottle of wine (preferably one of the drier reds) handy.
Today, then, is the day where I wrote a double bar, this time on my setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XII, the first song in a set of two, the other a setting of Sonnet LX. I still need to set LX, but in the end, both will make up a trifle called Time Sonnets.
I’ve come up with a novel perhaps contrived idea for how to set Sonnet LX, but I won’t reveal the idea just quite yet. All I will say is that it is perhaps more contrived than novel. And it is so contrived that I shall be able to write it all out in an afternoon.
(For those of you who know me, you know that I work very, very, very slowly a la Ravel. [I always add the a la Ravel.] So, to finish something in an afternoon is very rare indeed.)
What comes of this unopened bottle of wine, however? Well, after I write the double bar, I bask in the usual glowing feeling I feel whenever I finish something. It’s a kind of glow that lasts for a couple hours. A subtle kind of subdued euphoria. A euphoria of small portions that dishes itself out slowly over the course of the evening.
(I tend to write my double bars in the evening or late at night.)
After I bask in this smallest of glows, I take the bottle, slowly and mechanically turn the corkscrew into the cork, forcefully yet gently pull the cork out, listen to the slightly toned pop of the cork as it comes out, sniff the cork, admire its bouquet (I don’t really know how to admire bouquets), and pour a modestly sized glass of wine, as if ever there were a perfectly sized modest size that the Council of Measurably Modest Sizes, who naturally measure up modest sizes, declare that this modestly sized glass of wine is the modestly sized size of all modest sizes that future modestly sized modest sizes must live up to. In a modest kind of way, naturally.
It’s that kind of modest size.
And I drink the glass of wine.
But for the first time I write about drinking it.
(And it occurs to me that if we were to be pedantic, technically we should say, “I drink the wine in the glass,” not, “I drink the glass of wine.” Sounds like we’re somehow drinking glass, which I suppose could be possible yet deadly and torturous at the right temperatures.)
And so here’s to years and years more of simple, modest pleasures that provide life with those little gems (and tangents difficult to control) and sparkling moments that give us all a much deserved pause to appreciate small beauties and ordinary yet miraculous times.