She Be Nine. Nine

Human beings are capable of amazing things.

A nine-year-old playing Chopin like that would make a fine Exhibit A of amazing human tricks, but it’s just one of a million zillion permutations. Chopin wrote that. People at Steinway built that coffin of strings and teeth. A whole lot of nameless, faceless people erected various iterations of civilizations — civilizations capable of weaving tapestries of commerce and art and science and trade and negotiation and culture. Said cultures occasionally produce things like a little Chinese girl, banging out a composition from a man who was barely born recently enough to have a photograph of him taken, on a New York piano, while we watch it on an Intertunnel utility that exists in an ether filled with nothing but ones and zeros. Every step of the way is indistinguishable from magic.

She is gifted. Then again, we all are. What are we doing with our gifts?