Life's Pleasures Quote by La Monte Young

There is something disarmingly earnest in La Monte Young's faith that knowledge, once offered, gets "eaten up" - not merely consumed, but metabolized. Coming from a composer who helped invent minimalism by insisting that tiny shifts in sound could reorganize a listener's sense of time, the metaphor lands as more than feel-good pedagogy. It frames knowledge as bodily, cumulative, and intimate: not a credential or a download, but a nutrient that changes what you are.

The repetition ("and... and... and...") matters. It's a spoken-chain rhythm that mimics oral transmission, the kind of learning that happens in rehearsal rooms, late-night listening sessions, guru-student lineages, and scene-building - all relevant to Young, whose work often lives as much in sustained practice as in finished artifacts. The subtext is quietly anti-gatekeeping. He's pushing against the idea that avant-garde work must remain hermetic to stay pure. If you make the information available, people will "utilize it", which is a practical verb: knowledge isn't meant to be admired at a distance, it's meant to be used, rerouted, turned into craft.

There's also an implied critique of cultural institutions that ration access - to archives, to technique, to the why behind the work. Young isn't romanticizing the audience as passive; he's betting on appetite. In an art world that often confuses obscurity with depth, his line argues that depth can be shared without being diluted, and that the real radical move is letting others take it into themselves.