Date: 2005-05-11
To: Challenge
Miles today: 0.0

The following was the basis for a speech I gave to my St Mark's Venturer company on challenge. For challenge is what Venturers is all about. Last night, the company has agreed to sponsor me for my two month trek. Their donation will be given to the World Brotherhood of Scouts - Street Scouts in Kenya.So now I am a sponsored AT hiker!Subject: Itzhak PerlmanArticle from the Houston ChronicleOn Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him.He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stageone step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an incredible sight. He walkspainfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down,slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks onefoot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makeshis way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while heundoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap. It went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do.People who were there that night thought to themselves: "We figured that hewould have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another string for this one."But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyoneknows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, hanging, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never madebefore.When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. Andthen applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quietus, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone,"You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much musicyou can still make with what you have left."What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since Iheard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the way of life - not just for artistsbut for all of us. Here is a man who has prepared all his life to make musicon a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle of aconcert, finds himself with only three strings. So he makes music with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he had ever made before, when he had four strings.So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is: Make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left. Houston Chronicle