After-Orts #121

It was interesting to see him [Schubert] compose. He very seldom made use of the pianoforte while doing it. He often used to say it would make him lose his train of thought. Quite quietly, and hardly disturbed by the unavoidable chatter and din of his friends around him, he would sit at the little writing-desk, bent over the music paper and the book of poems (he was short-sighted), bite his pen, drum with his fingers at the same time, trying things out, and continue to write easily and fluently, without many corrections, as if it had to be like that and not otherwise.
     -- Schubert's classmate and friend Albert Stadler, about 1815, when both were 18; quoted in a lovely illustrated biography, Schubert: His Life and Times, by Peggy Woodford, 1978/80

from the same source:
To see and hear him play his own pianoforte compositions was a real pleasure. A beautiful touch, a quiet hand, clear, neat playing, full of insight and feeling. He still belonged to the old school of good pianoforte players, whose fingers had not yet begun to attack the poor keys like birds of prey.

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If you could tag each of the atoms in your body and follow them backward in time, through the air that you breathed during your life, through the food that you ate, back through the geological history of the Earth, through the ancient seas and soil, back to the formation of the Earth out of the solar nebular cloud, and then out into interstellar space, you could trace each of your atoms, those exact atoms, to particular massive stars in the past of our galaxy. At the end of their lifetimes, those stars exploded and spewed out their newly forged atoms into space, later to condense into planets and oceans and plants and your body at this moment.
     -- Alan Lightman, in The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science