A ballet dancer goes onstage on a given night, in... | Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

Sunday, April 25 2010

“A ballet dancer goes onstage on a given night, in a specific theater, in a specific ballet and executes, in a specific fraction of musical time a movement that is already past just as it appears. And it takes far more than 10,000 hours of practice and repetition to make this movement exquisite, worthy. A dancer’s entire career consists of these moments of non-existence; they are not even fleeting, they are, somehow, never there at all, a shadow in someone else’s mind at best.”

This essay by Toni Bentley, a former dancer who had to get her hip replaced, on the blog for the New York Review of Books is beautiful and horrifying, a testament to the intricacies of the human body and the ways in which we are both in control of and helpless to the changes it must go through. (via britticisms)

““Yeah, this is the taxidermist and yeah we’re closed.” Images of him in some dark workshop drying out the dead late into the night came to mind. I explained that I needed my recently removed hip bone “treated” in some fashion. He warmed up a little. It was illegal, he explained, for him to have human bones on his premises—at least the kind that are free-floating. “But I can tell you what to do. It’s very easy,” he said cheerfully.”

(via tanya77)

A couple of weeks ago, a surgeon went in, cut off the top two inches of my right femur and replaced it with a cobalt-and-ceramic joint; here I am two weeks later walking around better than I have for years. It’s an amazing, and increasingly common, thing (the surgeon who did my hip replaced six others that day; HSS is adding three floors to handle all the new cases), but I’ve not seen the experience described so well as Toni Bentley does here.