the study of creativity.

Today my professor played us a piece of music and asked us to write down what we thought the sentence structure of the piece would look like. Would it be filled with commas, m-dashes, exclamation points? Would it be a poem, or prose?

Then she asked us to use our imaginations and paint the piece of music in words.

The piece consisted of two instruments that I could make out; an organ and a horn. I wrote that the organ was an old lady in church nodding off, and that the horn was the preacher yelling hellfire and damnation, and that the whole piece had this eighties cheesy charm to it that reminded me of Love Story but mostly made me a bit queasy.

She turned off the piece, and I raised my hand, excited to share because I believed I had nailed it. She pointed to me, and then casually mentioned that this piece was the music in her wedding. I choked, coughed, told her to come back to me, and by the time it was my turn had prepared a lovely summary of a swan gliding on the a lake at dusk. The organ was the swan, and the horn was the sunset.

I think I brought tears to her eyes.