by David D. Horowitz
It’s midnight:
The high school English teacher sits at her paper-crowded kitchen table. She prepares the vocabulary list, grammar hand-out, and read-aloud session of tomorrow’s first-hour class. Helped by her conversation yesterday with another teacher, she anticipates questions, objections, oversights. She refines notes, scribbles explorations. We’ll do the ten-sentence in-class exercise on non-restrictive comma use before reading aloud. That way we can better study how the essay writer uses commas as well as develops his theme.
Manager Patience reruns the videotape the eighty-seventh time. He thinks he detects a slight, telling hitch in the swing of Hernandez, the clean-up hitter for tomorrow’s opponents. He consults stat sheets, data bases, scouting reports: Hernandez hits only .246 when facing curveball-throwing lefties. And he often hits ground balls on sliders thrown just below the knee. Tomorrow I’ll start Smith, the left-handed long reliever. He’s had four days rest and is perfect for this role.
Fingers and neck calloused, eyes strained, the violinist practices the symphonic phrase for next week’s concert. He repeats it the sixtieth, the sixty-first, the sixty-second time. At last: I see the problem. I’ve been playing that phrase too fast. Slow it a drop…. Yes! That’s better. Now, in the second movement….
The excellent tirelessly rehearse and rebelliously wonder. They consult peers to diversify perspective. They research the taken-for-granted, wrestle with minutest details, challenge dogmas, battle their own fatigue. Ultimately, the performance not only tests them but refines their effort, as well as delights and challenges audiences. Breakthroughs occasionally illuminate a moment. More often, an unglamorous detail improves a jot—after intense self-criticism over a mistake and days of consequent effort. Great public performance is the rose at the end of a long, thorny stem.