The Song of the Lark is the story of a musically gifted young girl. She is on vacation near Flagstaff, AZ after a grueling year of studying voice in Chicago. She spends time alone in the Cliff-Dwellers’ ruins.
She could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident whirr of the big locusts, and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up. Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch up with her. She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort.
A few pages later Thea finds fragments of pottery and reflects on the role of water and pottery in the lives of the women who once lived there. “Their pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element itself.”
One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself–life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.
I am enjoying this book immensely. It is not a breeze through book. I read it pensively, and often lift my head and just think about the words. I come home from working out and want to read on, but I restrict this book to the elliptical machine. It keeps me going back!!
A Living Pencil 