Jessica.H: Psalm 34 ›

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

How to Dress Well - Decisions (Orchestral Version)

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Ideal dinner party location!

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jaymug:

You are an explorer.

(via halfadams)

The doctrine of the divine unity means not only that there is but one God; it means also that God is simple, uncomplex, one with Himself. The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts. Between His attributes no contradiction can exist. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one. All of God does all that God does; He does not divide Himself to perform a work, but works in the total unity of His being.

eceu:

Prelude: Op.28 No.15 in D flat major (‘Raindrop Prelude’) - Frederic Chopin

“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart… they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams…”  - Franz Liszt

Written in the winter of 1838, while on a secluded vacation with his lover, George Sand, and her two children, Frederic Chopin’s “Prelude Op.28:No.15 in D flat major” - one of 24 preludes composed within in the same time period in a supposed tribute to Bach - ultimately emerged as one of the best known of all his compositions.

The four stayed in rooms at an old Carthusian monestary at Valldemossa, Chopin himself in a room which he later described as “a strange place”. But out of this “strange place” emerged a beautifully sad masterwork, a barely six minute piano piece that leads one through a lifetime of emotions, anchored by the repeating A-Flat that appears throughout the piece (thought by many to sound much like raindrops, hence its nickname).

The rain-inspired origin of the prelude is a bit hard to pin down, though popular belief is that Chopin composed it in the midst of an intense thunderstorm at Valldemossa in which his lover (Sand) and her son were stuck walking home in. Fearing greatly for their safety, Chopin supposedly calmed himself by improvising music around the sound of the rain falling on the roof of the monastary. Others believe an ailing Chopin actually wrote it while hallucinating in the middle of the night during a particularly powerful storm. And still others insist that Sand, a renowned author herself, had invented the entire thing, creating its myth by mentioning it in a later memoir:

“There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain - it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out “encampment.” The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might - and he was right to - against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky…  

-Histoire de Ma Vie, 5 vols., Paris, 1902–04, IV, pp. 439–40

Ultimately, origin aside, this nocturnal, rainy prelude made some kind of sense to Chopin on a winter’s night in 1838, and it makes every bit as much sense when I put it on after a particularly long day of work now, in the first month of 2012. No matter when or where you are in time, a song like this has the power, the ability, to hold you.

One of my favorites

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James 4:6

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

I might have a mild case of music A.D.D., but since the first time I heard this song, it has never been skipped!

Excerpt from Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, which I just finished viewing and thoroughly enjoyed (though my face was a bit twisted up while watching due to the extreme focus* that was needed to follow N.D. Wilson’s poetic narrative). I love films that really make me think…present challenges…shift perspectives…give new meanings to the old and forgotten. Definitely check it out if you get a chance!

* this is either an indication that it has been much too long since from the glorious days of ARHU and being immersed in the endless pages of philosophical reading, or that I am very, very sleepy…haha