Among the best moments for me are those when a connection suddenly appears between two formerly-disparate realms, like an electrical arc leaping into brilliance across the final gap in a circuit. Fortunately, since my ignorance is huge such happy instants of discovery happen all the time. A tiny one came the other day when, as we listened to some classical music on the car radio during an early morning drive to his school, RadRob happened to mention that the musical term arpeggio comes from the word arpa — the root of harp. Blatantly obvious in hindsight: racing fingers across a harp's strings make an instant arpeggio of notes. Had I only known sooner ...

(see also EdgeOfTheUniverse (8 Jun 1999), KnowledgeAndConsistency (7 Feb 2001), ...)

TopicLanguage - TopicArt - 2003-03-06

(correlates: ToastyOvaries, InfiniteInAllDirections, PianoRecital, ...)