Hannah Fries

Oct 25, 2024 | terrain.org | Hannah Fries |Heidi Seaborn

IntroductionI met Oliver Caplan during our first year at Dartmouth College amidst a silly but studious cadre of musical misfits. He played piccolo in the marching band, and I played French horn in the wind symphony. Sometimes I sat in the stands with the band and played kazoo, just for the company. The first things that struck me about Oliver were his irrepressible smile and infectious laugh. He worked at the local Ben & Jerry’s and always gave an extra-large scoop to friends.

Jul 13, 2024 | homepaddock.wordpress.com | Hannah Fries |Ele Ludemann

LET THE LAST THING BE SONGby Hannah Friesi. Memory is safest in someone with amnesia. Behind locked doorsglow the unmarred pieces—musical notes hummingin a jumble, onlywaiting to bearranged. ii. What is left in onewho does not remember? Love and music. Not a name but the fullness. Not the sequence of eventsbut order of rhythm and pitch,a piece of time in which to exist. iii. A tone traveling through space has no referent,and yet we infer, and yet itfinds its way between our cellsand shakes us.

Jul 4, 2024 | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova |Hannah Fries

A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning. And yet this musicality is more than a metaphor — it is part of our material nature, our creaturely inheritance. “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” wrote the poet Ronald Johnson.

May 26, 2024 | orionmagazine.org | Hannah Fries

I HAVE FORAGED the unmowed yard and sprinkled violets and dandelion petals on salads in May. I have fingered the tiny purple-pink florets of wild oregano and chives and let them fall like stars onto my tongue. I have stuffed squash blossoms with goat cheese and fried the unopened buds of day lilies. Unopened buds! Yes, long and slender, pale green with a blush of orange foretelling their future cut short. Such possibility—beauty on the brink of realization—taken in, consumed.

Nov 18, 2023 | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova |Hannah Fries

“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert. No aliveness animates the nocturne with more grandeur than the migration of birds.