Of Gardens and Innocence
Now is Tuesday, 26 September 2006.
In Our Town, Thornton Wilder writes, “Don’t the morning star get wonderful bright, just before it disappears?”
Thought of that this early morning, when I went out into the gardens of the family compound, to add water to birdbaths and other daily chores, and discovered 5 roses blooming.
Two saturated red, one so saturated tangerine as to be almost orange, one climbing pink, and one climbing yellow. The latter, “King Tut”, on the fence outside the dining room south window, was planted by Mr. and Mrs. HH for her Mother, ca. 1999.
They’d been dormant for the hot months, and now deliver one final bloom of beauty, defiant of the impending cold.
Some sort of little purple lily, five inches high, three of them bloom.
Bushes with red berries, and orange. Begonias and geraniums.
And, for the past two weeks, a good Monarch butterfly a minute.
Perhaps as balance, I saw a small rabbit, probably of those born in the spring, hopping slowly with a wound of some kind on the right rear leg, probably the gift of a neighborhood dog. (Before HH lets out his dogs, he surveys for defenseless critters the one acre that is fenced, and then conducts close supervision.) Tried to catch s/he, but even a wounded rabbit can out-hop HH.
As if we needed one more lesson (compare and contrast), after the recent exemplars of Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, ad infinitum, to remind us humans we’re of the sub-animal kingdom.
__________________________________________
On this date died two great musicians:
1937 – Bessie Smith
1945 – Bela Bartok
In Our Town, Thornton Wilder writes, “Don’t the morning star get wonderful bright, just before it disappears?”
Thought of that this early morning, when I went out into the gardens of the family compound, to add water to birdbaths and other daily chores, and discovered 5 roses blooming.
Two saturated red, one so saturated tangerine as to be almost orange, one climbing pink, and one climbing yellow. The latter, “King Tut”, on the fence outside the dining room south window, was planted by Mr. and Mrs. HH for her Mother, ca. 1999.
They’d been dormant for the hot months, and now deliver one final bloom of beauty, defiant of the impending cold.
Some sort of little purple lily, five inches high, three of them bloom.
Bushes with red berries, and orange. Begonias and geraniums.
And, for the past two weeks, a good Monarch butterfly a minute.
Perhaps as balance, I saw a small rabbit, probably of those born in the spring, hopping slowly with a wound of some kind on the right rear leg, probably the gift of a neighborhood dog. (Before HH lets out his dogs, he surveys for defenseless critters the one acre that is fenced, and then conducts close supervision.) Tried to catch s/he, but even a wounded rabbit can out-hop HH.
As if we needed one more lesson (compare and contrast), after the recent exemplars of Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, ad infinitum, to remind us humans we’re of the sub-animal kingdom.
__________________________________________
On this date died two great musicians:
1937 – Bessie Smith
1945 – Bela Bartok
posted by HH at 6:05 PM
1 Comments:
I know a few readers of the MoB might find pleasure in listening to the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste while following along with the musical score. Bartok composed it with a pine cone on his desk. The piece is a musical Fibonacci series.
Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the 40's knew that Bartok was dying of leukemia and commissioned the work that I consider to be the most publicly accessible of the Bartok oeuvre, the Concerto for Orchestra.
My understanding of Bartok's reply to being informed of his being diagnosed with a terminal illness is that I believe he felt as though the reality of his impending death was an incongruity since he believed that he yet had much work to do.
During my well indulged years as a music student, it was a luxurious pleasure to lose myself in the Concerto for Orchestra after having spent a few hours devoted to the musical analysis of the various Bartok works.
I do not invoke Requiescat in Pacem for Bela. Rather, I believe that he would find peace in being granted perpetual perserverence al fine.
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