Living in a fermata
Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers. Last year, over many runs through Central Park, I worked my way through his MasterClass on the art of storytelling. Up until then, I had never read his books. What a shame! A tragedy to have grown up without the worlds of Neil Gaiman! My children will not suffer this same fate.
Something about a MasterClass breeds a sense of deep familiarity with its teacher. Listening to Gaiman’s voice for hours on end, watching him look directly at me—at the end of it all, he didn’t feel like just a talking head, but a dear mentor. I cried at his last lesson. Gaiman will make you believe not just in magic—he’ll show you that you’re the magician.
I came across a message from him that’ll show you what I mean. He starts:
“I don’t think there’s a word for the moment between one breath and the next. The pause between an inhalation and an exhalation. But it seems to me that is precisely where we are, living in that fermata. A world full of people waiting to breathe again.”
Living in that fermata. I worship this sentence. Fermata—such a sonorous word for discordant times. For those who didn’t sing in three choirs in high school (zero hour, first period, AND LUNCH HOUR) a fermata tells you to hold a note or a rest. The length of the hold is up to your discretion.
Looks like a safe place to live, doesn’t it? Again, what a comforting metaphor, reminding us we needn’t fear a pause.
He goes on to read the introduction from a collection of his short stories. I’ve transcribed the message below, but you really must hear it. His voice is a lullaby.
There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams, and hearts. And yet as I write this, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile, is how very powerful they truly are.
There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean.
Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken—and what could be more frail than that?
But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.
We are tougher than we seem. We are tougher than we think. Our stories will outlive us. Let’s make them good.
P.S.
There is a name for the pause between an inhalation and exhalation. (Two names, actually). In yoga, prana means breath, or life force. Pranayama, one of the eight limbs of yoga, teaches us that there are four parts to each breath:
Inhalation (puraka)
Internal retention (antara-khumbaka)
Exhalation (rechaka)
External retention (bahya-khumbaka)
For me, meditation works best when I combine it with pranayama breathing. Although frankly, the distinction between them is silly. Pranayama is meditation. One of my favorite techniques is called Sama Vritti ("equal fluctuations”). It’s easy to do, and deeply calming. For more on this, see Light On Pranayama by B.K.S. Iyengar.