Dearest Hope

Some photo dumps here. Taken earlier this week at the Arb before AA totally surrendered into the depressing sun-deprived season.

Recently, a quote has come to me quite often:

[…] When you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.

—Fleabag

Hope, for me, means harmony in the air—the warmth of an unexpected friendship, the laughter and chitchat shared by listeners, the fleetingly thought-provocative conversation with a lovely interlocutor, the unexpected encounter of an inspiration…

Or music.

Music has been battling with and searching for harmony since time immemorial. At least the chasing, the balance, and the procedure that lands the listeners at a resolution.

Reconciliation is art’s favorite theme of all time. Beethoven finds his audibility in the music that strengthens his alter ego. Brahms extends his peculiarly guarded self in the ideational fabrication of structure. Shostakovich expresses the political resistance that he could not otherwise have been outspoken of.

(I didn’t realize my music trail has been so Eurocentric until this description above. I was trying to discuss maybe some Debussy or Ravel. Yet my ears are not quite intimate with them in recent times. Nor are my fingers.)

Of course, Schubert should never be left out.

My dearest, dearest Schubert.

My list of circulation recently has been an orchestral transcription of Die Schöne Müllerin and Tchaikovsky 5th, among some other usual routine music.

My life has been most of the time spent between me and the music. I always find myself left with anything else but music. Not sure if this is something worthy to be proud of.

Yesterday, I was asked what makes a music performance magic. I don’t know. I told that the best answer to describe that sort of music is, when the music is like a brook that flows into your heart (流进心里的音乐).

Because our mind is not open all the time, nor receptive. When we choose to embrace something wholeheartedly, our mind is open to hope.

You may find I am speaking in riddles. The fact that our heart can be touched is a riddle.

Maybe our mindset is manifested most transparently via our auditory trail.

Jonathan Larson said in Rent:

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.

525,600 minutes-how do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In 525,600 minutes-how do you measure a year in the life?

How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love. Seasons of love.

525,600 minutes! 525,000 journeys to plan. 525,600 minutes - how can you measure the life of a woman or man?

In truths that she learned, or in times that he cried. In bridges he burned, or the way that she died.

.

Christopher Moltisanti replies:

We are supposed to get all (_) weepy-eyed just cuz they turned off the heat in some guys’ loft??????????