As I try to put more of my writing energy today and tomorrow into writing a paper, bit by bit, I resort to copying to this blog quotations that have stuck in my mind -- for reasons that I may explain at some point. Loyal and gentle readers will know that I can't go too long without mentioning Bach. So I must oblige, taking the following excerpt from Jan Swafford's Vintage Guide to Classical Music (p. 81):

In 1850 the Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded to collect and publish what survived of this work. In the modern complete edition, that amounts to sixty volumes. It can be argued that those volumes constitute the most profound and magnificent body of work by a single mind, in any field, in the long human chronicle.