Body and Soul
I woke up Saturday morning with what I thought was a phrase from B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe: A vast gap between talent and desire. I hadn't slept well, fits of pique and doubt through most of the night, and sitting up that morning with the light coming in our windows, I thought that for all my desire, it might all come to naught (what, the murmured Yeats lines: "Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.") for want of talent. Perhaps a bit melodramatic, but I flipped through Fairchild tonight to find the passage. Tellingly, I'd remembered it wrong.
From his "Body and Soul":
From his "Body and Soul":
...Rain in Los Angeles, the hope that tomorow is the washed light of winter, or what passes for it.
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge has also encountered for his first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen
as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoman Sunday, the blonde
and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be fogiven.
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