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one that has been down hearted.  I have often wanted to die & I feel now plain it was my stupidity.  I was playing my trills drawing from plaster casts.
     As you approach perfection in your playing your progress must necessarily be very slow at last imperceptible but if you see people far far ahead of you yet so that your [[strikethrough]] cu [[strikethrough]] straight line that your curve will never reach is still far behind them you must find a new curve a new way of practise.  Suppose you play from memory every day.  It is likely that will push you on fast for a while in a new curve.  Practise reading at sight.  It has been learned.  All the great musicians have done.  Try transposing at sight.  I have heard that done.  I will warrant you that if you do these things for a while you will now get on faster than by simple playing.  Play duets with Charley.  When at last you are near perfection I imagine that even little tricks if entirely new in going straight to A B [[strikethrough]] would [[strikethrough]] for a few minutes would help more than an hour of old fashioned work.  Skating is a very simple thing to music & how much do I not owe to fooling on skates, to skating over rough ice, to hopping on one foot to awkward unusual motions that [[strikethrough]] are [[/strikethrough]] none but the young undignified dare do but such tricks ought never to be seen especially in music.

[[strikethrough]] To know [[/strikethrough]] One who composes music will have a considerable advantage [[strikethrough]] over one who [[/strikethrough]] in playing over one who does not & if Carl Wolfsohn makes compositions too you must not want to play exactly as well as he does without being able to do the same unless perhaps you had fifty times the practice.

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Paris Nov. 13, 67

Dear Fanny, After a little over a week of not getting any letters, they are beginning to pile in & I only hope they will go on coming at the present rate.  They do not come in the inverse order, that is last year's now & vice-versa but they dont come in anything like regular order.  The last one however is all right announcing Bill Sartain's arrival.  It is in its place I believe.  I am glad he is home safe & so well.  Among your letters is your dolorous one about your music.  When you get so awful low spirited just go hear some fashionable young lady play a flash piece & then go take a walk to [[??]] or a row up the river.  I dont know anything about music except it should be like other things that I do know and yet I will try to give you advice or encourage you in your own ideas by letting you mine as you seemed wanting me to say something for nearly all sisters put great faith in their big brothers.  If you try right hard I think you will understand what I am going to say.  When I was studying mathematics I had a good deal to do with curves of a certain kind of which I forget the name. Here is an example.

[[Image: graph]]

Draw the straight line A B & another A C on which lay off any distance A X.  Draw then ever so many lines from the point C intersecting the line A B, & from the line A B keep laying off always the same distance towards C.  If you then draw a line through all your dots you have the curve X Y.  Now the peculiarity of these curves is that they keep getting closer & closer to the straight line but would not touch it if they went on forever.  There is an infinity of these curves some start almost straight for the line & wheel suddenly this way [[image]] Some might keep a long time [[image]] & suddenly go up but they all of them keep getting closer to the line all the time but can never touch it.