I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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Because the widow of the arms manufacturer loves to listen to concertos in the evening, the city finally has an orchestra. All his life that honest man, her husband, served humanity by making guns, then in his sleep one night performed the final philanthropic act of dying. Now we lean back in our deep upholstered seats and float up through the auditorium, lifted on a wind of twenty violins. Where are the atrocities of yesteryear? sings the chorus in Italian. Where are the slaves and graves? Down in the concrete, under the foundation, answers the bassoon. The earth is a lady who refuses to gossip. One of her virtues is fast forgetting. So no one smells the gunpowder buried deep inside the curtains; no one sees the blood congealed around the legs of the piano as the baritone begins his serenade. But sometimes you can glimpse, barely visible above the brass, those small red threads woven through the air like writhing nerves. These, too, are part of our inheritance; these, plus a love of music.
Tony Hoagland