I was stuck waiting the other day...

...at the vet's office and got to thinking how it's all about proportion.

Really. What we think of anything depends on where we're coming from as much as it does on the thing itself. Think about that. In art, would the Mona Lisa appear to be more or less impressive if it were hung in a gallery with wide-striped wallpaper? In life, would the pleasure I take in seeing my dog each evening be as intense if I had to bring her to work every day? Our appreciation of anything is not absolute, but dependent on circumstances.

I was thinking of this while looking at a pet publication that contained an ad that included a drawing of a sphinx, but in the shape of a dachshund. And I thought, what if someone actually went and built something like that? A thousand years ago, in the era of manual labor, it would be a major achievement, something to be contemplated and celebrated and discussed. But nowadays, with so much stuff all around us, would anyone really care? It would be just another distraction to think about for a moment and then be forgotten. And I wonder how much wonder we lose because of this. A hundred years ago, the idea of a manmade flying machine was miraculous, the culmination of centuries of dreaming. Today, when we fly on a plane, forget about wonder: we complain about the food and arriving five minutes late.

In terms of art and my life, the place I see this in close-up fashion is in creating improvised film scores for silent films. Some of these can be three hours long, and if you push too hard too soon with the music, you wind up with nowhere left to go. In real terms, if you ramp it up prematurely, what happens is that you begin to lose track of the detail in the music, and it all becomes mush, and you have nothing left to underscore any really big moments in the film that are bound to come later. It's important to always have something in reserve.

This is news to me because I am not blessed with an innate sense of balance or proportion. In childhood, a frequent criticism was "you don't know when to stop!" That was another way of saying, "Your sense of proportion is either greatly askew or completely missing." Some people have it, some don't. I recall the gravestone inscription of early television pioneer Ernie Kovacs: "Nothing in Moderation."

In terms of music, when I first began listening to classical music on LPs borrowed from the public library in my hometown of Nashua, N.H., I would always gravitate toward the fast and exciting movements of anything I was listening to. Beethoven's 7th? Great finale! Brahms' 1st? What an ending! At the time, I would have been overjoyed to find a symphony made up of four finales—after all, those had the best stuff, so why not stick with what works? (Well, what do you expect of a junior high student?) Later, I had a friend at college who would judge a musical comedy's worth based on its quantity of show-stoppers. By that standard, "Hello Dolly" was a work of genius: "Every tune a show-stopper!" he'd exclaim.

But I now know that slow movements are essential, not just on their own but also as a way to heighten the exciting stuff in other places. And I realize, too, that this is something I actually learned in another way at a very early age, but I'm only now putting the pieces together. I was maybe four years old, and my mother served me a hard-boiled egg standing up in a small egg cup. I tapped the shell and began peeling it off, putting bits of egg into my mouth. Yum! But then my mother shook a little salt on, and the next bite was DOUBLE YUM! So naturally, I figured the more salt you put on an egg, the better it would taste. (This is the same innocently logical part of me that used to say "fiveteen" instead of "fifteen," I'm told.) So I went and dumped half the salt shaker's contents on the egg. Greedily shoving the next spoonful in my mouth, I puckered and spit it out. Awful! And thus I learned, or should have learned, a little something about how the world works, and what role proportion needs to play in place of innocent logic.

The seeds of so much of what we need to know in life are planted in childhood. If we could just maintain a connection to them, we could be so much wiser.

But then I'm compelled to think it out further: if the essence of being human is to be imperfect, then wouldn't the ultimate celebration of our humanity be a work of art that throws this balance out in favor of a unique personal preference that completely disregards any sense of balance or symmetry? Something to think about.