It happened near the end of the term, when the students had become comfortable enough to stop asking technical questions. No longer how to rhyme “orange” or whether a bridge should modulate. Those questions had given way to more dangerous ones.

A student in the back raised her hand.

“Is there anything you refuse to write about?”

The teacher looked out the window for a long time.

“I’ve discovered,” he said finally, “that there are subjects I don’t trust myself to understand while I’m writing them.”

Another student leaned forward.

“Like what?”

The teacher smiled.

“The interesting thing isn’t which subjects. It’s how you know.”

Nobody spoke.

“You can usually feel it. There are experiences that invite language, and there are experiences that recruit it. One wants to be understood. The other wants to use you. They look almost identical from a distance.”

A student who wrote angry political songs frowned.

“So you avoid controversy?”

“No.”

“Religion?”

“No.”

“Family?”

“No.”

“Love?”

The teacher laughed.

“If I avoided love, I’d have retired years ago.”

Someone suggested war. Someone else suggested death.
The teacher shook his head after each proposal.

“I avoid certain relationships with topics.” he said.

The students looked disappointed.

He continued.

“Sometimes a subject arrives too early. You write about it because you need revenge, or sympathy, or an alibi. The song becomes a lawyer instead of a piece of music. Other times enough years pass that the event no longer needs to win.”

He paused.

“I distrust anything I desperately need the audience to believe.”

One student scribbled this into a notebook.

Another asked, “So how do you know when you’re ready?”

The teacher closed the piano lid.

“When I can imagine writing the opposite with equal conviction.”

The bell rang.

Backpacks zipped.

The students left discussing rhymes and metaphors and whether the old man had answered the question at all.

He had.

Just not in a way they could use until much later.