From the arts-sports [like ice-dance] I took heart [about my possible triviality]. They proved that creativity is indivisible. The skaters, the divers and the gymnasts reminded me that what I read in books, saw in pictures and heard in music had all started in a fundamental human compulsion to give dynamism shape. […] There are moments in Shakespeare when he sets three or four ideas all travelling at once through each other’s trajectories. He couldn’t have been thinking of Bach, who wasn’t born yet. But he might well have been thinking of a juggler he stopped to watch on the way to work. — from “Souls on Ice: Torvill and Dean”, Postscript (ii), in Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James, Picador 2001.
Flit Lit
by Krilling for Company in Art, Juggling, Quotations and tagged art, art-criticism, artistic sports, arts-sports, arty sports, Bach, Clive James, connections between the arts, counterpoint, dance, diving, gymnastics, ice-dance, ideas, juggling, literature, Shakespeare, skating, sports, the arts |
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