Actually Steve Almond talks dirty a lot of the time. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about a paragraph in “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.” In the following quote, SA is talking about a musician he admires:

“That was how Boris operated. The turmoil of his life invoked the refuge of music where he found, if not quietude, at least an ordered universe. He knew which notes would produce beauty, how to arrange them, which details to include, the optimal tempo, how the song sounded in his head, and how to make it sound that way in the world. . .”
Remind you of anything? Writing, for instance? A lot of us find refuge in fiction and poetry. In language. We struggle to find the words that will produce beauty; we arrange and rearrange them. We look for the telling, even the most plangent, detail as well as the optimal tempo.
We really are all in this together — the novelists, the poets, the musicians — their theirness bleeding into our ourness. Oh, yeah — and the synchronized swimmers. They’re in there with us, too, in those beautiful spangly suits.