Art, adversity, and the strength of the human spirit
Nobuyuki Tsujii, the blind piano prodigy, along with Paralympian Alexandra Truwit and opera singer Eli Hanssveen, showcase the immense power of the mind to overcome life’s greatest challenges
By Anita Pratap
It all starts in the mind. As an adorable four-year-old, Nobuyuki Tsujii loved sounds. He sat with chubby legs splayed, a toy piano keyboard on his lap, banging and caressing the keys. The diversity of sounds delighted him. All senses on high alert, he says he could touch the sounds, see colours in the notes. Like Vincent van Gogh, Nobu celebrates the richness of life through art. No detail is too small or humble.
Nobu was born blind. Far from restraining him, the disability drove him to develop his acute hearing to exquisite heights. He blossomed into a child prodigy, became Japan’s most famous pianist. Now, at 37, he plays with the world’s most famous philharmonic orchestras—in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Milan, Tokyo, Sydney. He cocks his ear to get cues from the conductor he cannot see. He doesn’t miss a beat, his fingers flying and fluttering over the keys, his characteristic headshaking accelerating to vigorous immersion.
Nobu yearns to see… stars, waves, the faces of his parents. But no self-pity, no succumbing to obstacles for him. Instead, he willed his mind to fulfil his dream. Like artists and adventurers, athletes, too, are inspirational in highlighting the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. Beating all odds through sheer willpower.
In May 2023, athlete Alexandra Truwit was snorkelling near the Bahamas when she lost her left leg in a shark attack. Eleven months after amputation, she won two medals in the Paris Paralympics. This month, she ran the New York marathon with a prosthetic blade. She says, “I have relied on other people’s comeback stories to hold on to what seemed an unrealistic hope.” She named her foundation “Stronger than you think”.
As the joke goes, Eli Hanssveen looks and sounds like she was made when God was in fine mood. Beautiful, wholesome and playful with a voice that can make angels weep… aching, grand, joyful. But her road to success was land-mined. She faced prejudice because she came from the hinterland, a “suburb of nowhere”. She says nobody in her family or community understood what “I want to be an artist” even meant. Singing became her secret passion, she kept practising, even over-practising. She swallowed snobbery and setbacks—until she became a singer in the Oslo opera.
Being a war correspondent means having to see fields strewn with corpses, streets with bomb-shattered bodies or threatened by gun-toting guerrillas and soldiers. Yet, one of my most chilling, unforgettable experiences was visiting Mauthausen, the World War II concentration camp with its menacing watch towers and ghastly gas chambers. Austrian authorities turned it into a museum to remind us of the unspeakable suffering inflicted by humans against humans.
That visit took place 22 years ago. Unerasable is the guide’s description of naked, starving, shivering Jews in a communal shower. Instead of water, lethal gas seeped out of the sprinklers. In sharp contrast, that same evening there was a sublime concert by pianist Rudolf Buchbinder. Human hands inflicted soul-shattering evil in Mauthausen. But in Vienna’s Musikverein concert hall, the hands of a pianist uplifted the audience to celestial grace. The urge to find beauty, to excel, to seek something divine springs from the mind. It starts in the mind, but it doesn’t have to end in their mind. Long after these “artists of life” have gone, the grit they personify, the emotions they awaken, the memories they bequeath, live on in the minds they have touched. No detail is too small or humble in a life well lived.
