Con prosciutto, agnello e marmellata di fragole
hic in antipodibus
Joined April 2015
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“Make a habit of reading something inspiring and cheerful just before going to sleep.”
Listening to Vaughan Williams’ “JOB” recently reminded me that it was the first work of RVW’s that I bought on LP back in 1965 in a performance conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.
The next work of his I bought was the 9th Symphony, again conducted by Boult. …..
….. It was not the easiest way to approach the music of the great man especially as I was then living on my own in a converted railway carriage at a one-teacher school in a remote village in the middle of NSW.
Such music, listened to at night…..
If your belief-system is so weak & unsound that you have to ban books, slogans, placards or even t-shirts because the opinions they express don’t align with what you’ve been taught to believe, then perhaps your belief-system doesn’t deserve to survive.
October 16 marks the 138th anniversary of the birth of American playwright Eugene O’Neill in New York City.
O'Neill is the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
#TheIcemanCometh #LongDaysJourneyIntoNight
16 October, 1926: “Háry János”, a Hungarian folk opera by Zoltán Kodály, is premiered at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest.
If you had told my parents that one day you would be sending a text message to members of your family in their rooms to let them know that dinner was ready (rather than walking all the way through the house & along a hallway) they’d have thought you were mad.
15 October: Remembering the great German organist, harpsichordist & conductor, Karl Richter, on the centenary of his birth in Plauen, Germany.
A musician of integrity & genius, he died at the age of 54 in Munich on 15 February, 1981.
“Every night, I ask myself the same question, and I find no answer: What if my strength is not enough this time?”
Every night, I sit alone in the darkness, as questions crowd my mind and fears I cannot share with anyone torment me.
I look at my children as they sleep, and I ask myself in terror: How will I be able to save their lives? How will I protect them from this brutal reality? And how will I give them a happy childhood and a life they deserve, when I cannot even guarantee the most basic necessities for their survival?
I look at my wife and think about her life and the life of our unborn child. I wonder how I will be able to save them both, and how I will provide them with a safe environment for childbirth, when I do not even have the power to pull my family out of this fear that haunts us day and night.
Then I think about my child who has not yet been born, and I wonder: How will I face him one day when he grows up and discovers that the world he was born into is not the world his father dreamed of, nor the world he deserved to be born into? How will I explain to him that I tried, with everything I had, to give him a different beginning, but I was fighting a reality harsher than I could bear?
Then I look at myself, at this exhausted body, this mind that no longer knows the meaning of rest, and this heart that lives on the verge of collapse every night. And I ask myself the most terrifying question: How much strength must I possess to save them all? How many times must I break inside before I can protect them?
No one sees what happens inside me when night falls. No one hears the screams of my thoughts, sees the terror I hide behind my silence, or knows how many times I live through the imagined death of my family before it happens, and how many times I force myself to get up the next day, simply because there are little lives depending on me, with no one but me to rely on.
I fear the night because it forces me to face the truth I try to escape throughout the day: I am a father expected to save his family in a reality that strips away, every single day, the very things I need to save them.
And what truly terrifies me is not losing my own life, but the possibility of a day when I become incapable of protecting those whose lives depend on me. Of reaching a moment when I need strength more than ever, only to discover that there is not enough left inside me to save them.
Every night, I ask myself the same question, and I find no answer: What if my strength is not enough this time?
“As a young man, I used to pretend I wasn’t part of the human race. That’s one solution. Or be a writer.”
~ Alan Bennett (‘Enough Said’)
