feuilles
Memory as we now know it is a dim foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the soul, or rather Christ in the soul, will exercise hereafter. It need no longer be intermittent. Above all, it need no longer be private to the soul in which it occurs. I can now communicate to you the fields of my boyhood–they are building-estates today–only imperfectly, by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can take you for a walk through them.
C.S. Lewis, from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Been listening to George Winston’s interpretation of Pachelbel’s “Variations on the Kanon.” It’s from Winston’s album December that I’ve listened to for ages, since I was a young boy. The song lies dormant for a time and reemerges periodically–I remember hearing it in the most disparate locations: the summer in Charlotte, the semester by myself in Syme when I first acquired the record player, in my room in Chapel Hill a few years ago… The list goes on.
As I related to Diane this afternoon, the song has a profound precision to it. The structure of overlapping and recursive notes is simple, but lay the variations upon the theme and the artistry comes through. There are songs in the jazz realm, among others, that extract emotion from simple combinations of notes, but nothing so seemingly elemental as this. It’s a bare-faced merging of the romantic and the pragmatic. I feel a familiarity, a pull toward both poles of the song–the repose, the safety of structure and the “rules” of the song which are evident, and the passion of the spontaneity combined. I recognize myself.