Daron Hagen Composer :: Official Site

I read an interview this morning with a very young concert music composer much caressed by powerful older colleagues and pundits. While reading his colorful, complacent replies to the interviewer, a breathless contemporary, I thought of my own callow, undignified twenties and shuddered involuntarily.

I thought how I was once jealous of others' self-absorption because I was certain it held, as I believed mine did, secrets of self knowledge. I assumed that the self-absorbed held, so closely and tenderly, many brave secrets and thoughts that would heighten and illuminate my search for identity. The enormity of deception was due to my own arrogance. As it happened, either these people had checked out, gone benignly insane, or had closed up for sanity—it was as simple as that. At the heart of the Sphinx, through the labyrinthine passages, was the rifled vault of a dead Pharaoh—no more. My frustration and anger were comical. In sadness, I grew up.

I thought of my son, and how someday I'll have to let him take his own rein, veering away off course in the matter of an occupation or profession—I'll have to experience the almost superhuman compassion and sorrow of seeing him gallop hell-bent to damnation without crying 'foul.'

I thought of the wonderful dignity of a child—who has allowed no assaults upon his integrity—has made no concessions of personality except those made through love to his parents. These concessions are the ones, solely, which in no way reduce or cheapen the giver. A child can concede through fear (through physical fear of punishment or emotional fear of rejection) and become at last a vicious rebel or a spiritless thing. That perhaps is truly dignity—inviolate integrity of personality that has made concessions only to beloved people, institutions or principles.