[Photographer unknown to me.]

Thomas Tallis
LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH

Peter Phillips
The Tallis Scholars

DORIS LESSING
The Grass is Singing
____________________

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Magdalena Kožená
LAMENTO

Reinhard Goebel
Musica Antiqua Köln

The Cranberries
EVERYBODY ELSE IS DOING IT, SO WHY CAN'T WE?

 

JØRGEN-FRANTZ JACOBSEN

____________________

It is precisely the enormous tension between sorrow and joy that makes life great. I have had my greatest moments when the sparks have flown between sorrow and joy. And death is fundamentally the brilliant relief to life. Life is great and demonic, worthy of being loved and obeyed. And the greatest thing in life is again resignation.

David Hansen
RIVALS
Arias for Farinelli and Co.

Alessandro de Marchi
Academia Montis Regalis

 

ITALO CALVINO

____________________

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

The Smiths
HATFUL OF HOLLOW

JOE HILL

Horns

____________________

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.

SCHITT'S CREEK

Season Six

Benjamin Britten
STRING QUARTETS 1, 2, and 3

Takács Quartet

ITALO CALVINO

Invisible Cities

____________________

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Howard Jones
HUMAN'S LIB

 

MASTER DŌGEN
____________________

Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. 
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Take heed that you do not squander your life.

Dinah Washington

THE SWINGIN' MISS "D"

Quincy Jones and His Orchestra

ALICE MUNRO
___________________

You protect yourself by thinking if you have all these rituals and routines then nothing can get you.

SCHITT'S CREEK

Season Five

Max Emanuel Cenčić
HANDEL OPERA ARIAS FOR MEZZO-SOPRANO

Diego Fasolis
I Barocchisti

 

bell hooks
____________________

I am passionate about everything in my life - first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.

TAHINI & TURMERIC
101 Middle Eastern Classics Made Irresistibly Vegan

____________________

Vicky Cohen and Ruth Fox

MARY RUEFLE
“I Cannot Be Quiet an Hour”
____________________

I begin
to talk to violets.
Tears fall into my soup
and I drink them.
Sooner or later
everyone donates something.
I carry wood, stone, and
hay in my head.
The eyes of the violets
grow very wide.
At the end of the day
I reglue the broken foot
of the china shepherd
who has put up with me.
Next door, in the house
of the clock-repairer,
a hundred clocks tick
at once. He and his wife
go about their business
sleeping peacefully at night.

John Adams
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE OTHER MARY

Gustavo Dudamel

Los Angeles Philharmonic
Los Angeles Master Chorale

 

Janssem Cardoso

From the series Other Colours

Arnold Schoenberg
PIANO CONCERTO, OP. 42

Mitsuko Uchida

Pierre Boulez
The Cleveland Orchestra

 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

____________________

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

NĀGĀRJUNA

____________________

Just as it is known

That an image of one's face is seen

Depending on a mirror

But does not really exist as a face,

So the conception of "I" exists

Dependent on mind and body,

But like the image of a face

The "I" does not at all exist as its own reality.

Alfred Schnittke
PSALMS OF REPENTANCE

Tõnu Kaljuste
Swedish Radio Choir

 

e. e. cummings

“what if a much of a which of a wind”

____________________

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer’s lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)

-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it’s they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn’t; blow death to was)

-all nothing’s only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

[Photographer unknown to me.]
 

H. P. LOVECRAFT
____________________

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

The Replacements
DON'T TELL A SOUL

 

Ravi Shankar
THREE RAGAS

SAMUEL BECKETT
Play

____________________

One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me.

FERMENT
A Guide to the Ancient Art of Culturing Foods from Kombucha to Sourdough

____________________

Holly Davis

DORIS LESSING
____________________

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Serge Prokofiev
THE FIERY ANGEL

Nadine Secunda, Ruthild Engert-Ely, Siefried Lorenz, Heinz Zednik, Kurt Moll

Neeme Järvi
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

 

T. S. ELIOT

The Family Reunion

____________________

We ask only to be reassured about the noises in the cellar and the window that should not have been open.

Cracow Klezmer Band
BERESHIT

 

Erkki-Sven Tüür

EXODUS

Paavo Järvi

Isabelle van Keulen

City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

EDWARD STUYVESANT BRAGG

From a speech seconding the presidential nomination of Grover Cleveland [July 9, 1884]

____________________

They love him most for the enemies he has made.

Leonard Rosenman
THE LORD OF THE RINGS
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Originally released in 1978.
 

BILLY COLLINS

“Forgetfulness”

____________________

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted  
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. 

JOHN BARTH

“Night-Sea Journey”

____________________

I shake my head; the thing is too preposterous; it is myself I talk to, to keep my reason in this awful darkness. There is no She! There is no You! I rave to myself; it’s Death alone that hears and summons. To the drowned, all seas are calm.

Nico Muhly
TWO BOYS

David Robertson
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus 

[Photographer unknown to me.]

LOUISE BOGAN

"Three Songs: Masked Woman’s Song”

____________________

Before I saw the tall man
Few women should see,
Beautiful and imposing
Was marble to me.

And virtue had its place
And evil its alarms,
But not for that worn face,
And not in those roped arms.

Eurythmics
IN THE GARDEN

 

ARTAUD THE MÔMO
And Other Major Poetry

____________________

Antonin Artaud

Translated by Clayton Eshleman

KOMBUCHA, KEFIR, AND BEYOND
A Fun and Flavorful Guide to Fermenting Your Own Probiotic Beverages at Home

____________________

Alex Lewin & Raquel Guajardo

SAM SHEPARD

Forensic & The Navigators

____________________

Doberman pinschers, German shepherds, wire-haired pointing griffons circling the place, sniffing for trouble, ready to tear out a throat on those that smell of a different turf. Do you understand? No young blond dopey muscle boys practicing jujitsu on the front lawn. We’re vulnerable as all get-out. We’ve left ourselves with our drawers down. That gives you all the room to plunge in and you have. Which means for us that we temporarily have to abandon the idea of temporarily abandoning the project and throw ourselves once again into the meat of the game. You’ve forced our hand, as it were.

Tom Waits
REAL GONE

 

HAROLD PINTER

Moonlight

____________________

You’re not a bad man. You’re just what we used to call a loudmouth. You can’t help it. It’s your nature. If you only kept your mouth shut more of the time life with you might just be tolerable.

Thelonious Monk
MONK AT NEWPORT 1963 & 1965

 

RYŌKAN

____________________

Down in the village
the din of
flute and drum,
here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines

Jean-Baptiste Lully
PROSERPINE

Hervé Niquet
Le Consert Spirituel

 

Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster
COLEMAN HAWKINS ENCOUNTERS BEN WEBSTER

Originally released in 1959.

 

STEPHEN BATCHELOR

____________________

Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

Cracow Klezmer Band
DE PROFUNDIS

 

KAZIM ALI

"Dear J."

____________________

It should be a letter
To the man inside
I could not become

Dressed in yellow
And green, the colors of spring
So I could leave death

In its chamber veined
With deep ore
I’ve no more to tell you

Last winter I climbed
The mountains of Musoorie
To hear frozen peals of bell and wire

A silver thread of sound
Sky to navel
Draws me

like the black strip
in a flower’s throat
meant to guide you in

I lie now in the winter
open-petaled beneath Sirius
I cereus bloom

The Dead South
ILLUSION & DOUBT

 

THE SUN

____________________

Issue 544
April 2021

 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The Respectable Prostitute

____________________

What’s done at night belongs to the night. In the day time you don’t talk about it.

For God so loved the world ...

John Coltrane
AFRO BLUE IMPRESSIONS

 

Recorded in 1963 and originally released in 1973.

ITALO CALVINO

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

____________________

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? 

Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. 

The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.

[Photographer unknown to me.]
 

Neko Case
MIDDLE CYCLONE

 H. P. LOVECRAFT

____________________

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.

Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else.

Tom Waits
NIGHTHAWKS AT THE DINER

 

ZEN AND THE BRAIN

James H. Austin, MD 

ANAÏS NIN

Delta of Venus

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.