Sherman's RULE OF THUMB:

The thumb is the capital, the fingers are the provinces. The fingers pay taxes to the thumb, which in turn diminishes the taxing strain on the fingers by providing a general security system and command center.

The thumb is not only the pivot and navigator of the hand; it is also the anchor, the Moor, the mooring, and the grey eminence, the catalyst, carburetor, tax collector, toxin, and jury, the fool and pillar, the pillow and support, the dumpling, furnace, and probe, the repository of memory and strategy, the compass, boundary, bounder, and lazy vagabond.... The thumb is by birth a beast on the way to becoming an aristocrat.

The thumb is a finger in the sense that the whale is a fish. This grand illusion is perpetuated by mountains of exercises designed to domesticate the lazy leviathan, the wild boar, the black sheep who is forbidden to roam on the black keys. So we coddle, cradle, and seduce the beast to behave like a mama's boy.... But you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Don't put a tutu on a piggy. Take advantage of his friendly and vigorous snout, which goes right to the kernel and core of the matter, to the stabilizing of the hand position.

Without the opposable thumb, the hand would scratch and feed like that of our monkey cousins. The sibling second through fifth fingers form a phalanx working against the thumb, but it's a battle that ends in a draw. As the two segments attract and repel, so the hand opens and closes, contracts and releases, analogous to the basic exercises of the body folding and unfolding, as devised by Martha Graham. Tension concentrating and dissipating, the story of man, fate, and all cycles. The hand opens, the hand closes, from which alternation come trills, tremolos, and articulated energy, Everything graceful and good that flows from the hand begins in this machine with two pistons in contrary motion.

-- from "Piano Pieces" - by Russell Sherman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NY) 1996, 244pp.

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