Celebrating.

Scourings.

Rockwell, Ichabod Crane, 1937

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.

From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe at hearing his nasal melody, “in linked sweetness long drawn out,” floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.

Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!

But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! And how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", found among the papers of the late Dietrich Knickerbocker in Geoffrey Crayon's Sketchbook

Music.

The boy stepped out under a moon of archaic bone, a paper bag of golden kernels, bulky and cool against his hip, felt like the stolen treasure. 

October 30, and the town had already begun to forget itself. Porch lights burned low as banked coals. The parchemnet of fallen leaves scraped the sidewalks in small, hurried flutterings of pages. The air was perfumed with the gardens he had passed—turned earth, the sweet-sour breath of the tomatoes, cabbages, and squshes still rooted there— the air itself tasted of matches struck and then blown out.  

He was twelve, or at least he was at supper. That night he was something older, thinner -- a wire pulled taut between the kitchen door he closed and the dark at the end of the block. His friends waited by the ancient oak that leaned like a eavesdropping man. Their whispers were no louder than the rustle of their satchels of munitions. One of them carried a pocket full of soap. Another carried a length of string and the bright, nervous idea of it. The kernels in his paper sack would provide abundant opportunities.

The night opened the way a book opens for a thumb. Lawns were pale roads. Windows were eyes that had not yet decided whether to see. Somewhere a dog barked twice and then thought better of it. The boy felt the particular pride of being uncaught: the cold climbed his wrists, the laugh that wanted to live in his throat forever and was told, for now, to stay. He cradled a handful of corn in his sweaty palm. For a moment it was only corn, ordinary, smooth, light. Then it left his hand and became constellations of small, pale comets. The stars shattered, exploding against the aluminum siding of the house with a sound like a battle drum. Porch lights flared. Somewhere a voice called a name that was not his. Exulted, the rebels scattered into the deepest murkiness provided between houses, and the shadows enveloped them without judgment.

Fifty years later he remembered the joyous adventure that lived in the running—the way his lungs burned clean, temples thundered, every shadow looked like a friend, until it wasn’t. Danger lived in the stopping, but laughter made even walking difficult.  

In the sudden quiet after the mischievous music had been made, the thought came forward, sharp as the first frost, that someone would have to rake it all up in the morning, and that the hand that gathered it, may belong to a man who remembered and did not curse the memory or the boy. 

The moon watched. It had seen this every year and still favors the stealthy.  

By the time he slipped back through the kitchen door his fingers smelled of the grains he robbed. His mother, still reading. She did not look up. On the table pumpkin pie awaited with an ice-cold glass of milk.

Outside, the town settled, floting in the golden wreckage of the night. The boy stood very still and listened to his own blood, which had not yet decided whether it has been changed ... or wanted to.

Unflinching.

Deiker, Rabbits in a Cabbage Field, 1864

THE SCARECROW

The Scarecrow

All winter through I bow my head

beneath the driving rain;

the North Wind powders me with snow

and blows me black again;

at midnight 'neath a maze of stars

I flame with glittering rime,

and stand above the stubble, stiff

as mail at morning-prime.

But when that child called Spring, and all

his host of children come,

scattering their buds and dew upon

these acres of my home,

some rapture in my rags awakes;

I lift void eyes and scan

the sky for crows, those ravening foes,

of my strange master, Man.

I watch him striding lank behind

his clashing team, and know

soon will the wheat swish body high

where once lay a sterile snow;

soon I shall gaze across a sea

of sun-begotten grain,

which my unflinching watch hath sealed

for harvest once again.

Walter de la Mare

Thanks for the image, Kurt ... don't neglect the sidebar.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Jethro Tull, "No Lullabye"

Keep your eyes open

And prick up your ears

Rehearse your loudest cry.

There's folk out there

Who would do you harm

So I'll sing you no lullaby.

There's a lock on the window;

There's a chain on the door:

A big dog in the hall.

But there's dragons and beasties

Out there in the night

To snatch you if you fall ...

Good morning.

Legendary.

Kelley, A Fine Autumnal Day, 1990

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known at all the country firesides, by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

Washington Irving, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Hang.

'Tis the last Thursday in October and the weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Devil May Care" ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Stanley, Witch Carving Pumpkin, 1928

Old Blind Dogs, "Terror Time"

The heather will fade

Aye, bracken will die

Streams will run cold and clear

Aye, the small birds they'll be goin'

For it's then that you'll be knowin'

That the terror time is here ...

Telemann, Sonata in D-Major, TWV 44:1

The Bremer Barockorchester performs ...

Buxheimer Organ Book, Virginem mire pulchritudinis

Luca Pianca performs ...

Mozart Sonata in D-Major for Two Pianos, K.44

Elina Akselrud and Denis Zhdanov perform ...

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Sweet Pumpkin"

RUSH, "New World Man"

What if Stewart Copeland played with RUSH?

I got to know him and then got to know the band. And getting deeper into it, going to see them, I get it. I understand why people get all reverent about Rush.

Wedge.

Ten.

Tolkien, Rivendell, 1937

Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed under a richly carved wooden ceiling, listening to a waterfall.

"Where am I, and what is the time?" he said aloud.

"In the house of Elrond, and it is ten o'clock in the morning," replied Gandalf. "It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of The Ring

Still.

Yet.

The LOVE of OCTOBER

A child looking at ruins grows younger

but cold

and wants to wake to a new name

I have been younger in October

than in all the months of spring

walnut and may leaves the color

of shoulders at the end of summer

a month that has been to the mountain

and become light there

the long grass lies pointing uphill

even in death for a reason

that none of us knows

and the wren laughs in the early shade now

come again shining glance in your good time

naked air late morning

my love is for lightness

of touch foot feather

the day is yet one more yellow leaf

and without turning I kiss the light

by an old well on the last of the month

gathering wild rose hips

in the sun

W.S. Merwin

Fight.

The word impossible does not exist for me. I’ve got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die — and might keep on fighting afterward, depends on where I am.

Ted Turner

Clifton Hicks, "Unquiet Grave"

Keeps.

Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1660

VERMEER

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

in painted quiet and concentration

keeps pouring milk day after day

from the pitcher to the bowl

the World hasn’t earned

the world’s end.

Wisława Szymborska 

Early.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Hallowe’en came early.

One year Hallowe’en came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes

Thanks, Kurt.

John Anderson, Rest in Peace

Ol' John has passed.

If ya only know one piece o' gritter poetry b'heart, make it this'n, featuring the pedal steel artistry of Paul Franklin ...

Rekindles.

Homer, The Pumpkin Patch, 1878

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Tell me where you hide by day?"

"In the cradle where the vapours

Dream the sunlit hours away."

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Who rekindles you at night?"

"Any firefly in the meadow

Lends a Jack-o'-Lantern light."

John B. Tabb

Wish.

“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.

Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.

This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

Stephen King, from "Mrs Todd's Shortcut"

Thanks to Kurtastrophe for introducing me to this way, way back in those heady days.

Voices.

Steve suggested that I begin sharing the ideas my students come up with in my classroom, so may I introduce Voices in The Wood.

We were trying to define art, artists, and artistic talents ...

For me art is a metaphor or a myth. I fear a lot of people think of art as just a physical outcome: a painting, a song, a poem. And after many discussions people will think of it as an emotion or how it makes them feel: beautiful, creative, fury, regret, envy. But this is my problem, if art can make you feel a unique specific emotion, why don't they call themselves a beautyist, furyist, and so on, because that describes the specific emotion. 

Abby

I'm a wonder-ist.  You?

Happy Birthday, Robert Bridges

LOW BAROMETER

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.

Robert Bridges, born on this day in 1844

Old Blind Dogs, "Tatties and Herrin'"

But awa tae the north

'Mongst the brave and the darin'

Tae the lads that were brocht up

On tatties and herrin' ...

Tremendous.

Audubon: A New Golden Age of Observation Is Revealing the Wonders of Night Migration ...

Billions of birds travel north in spring and south in fall, hundreds of species keeping a cycle of movement, and they do so primarily at night. While some large birds like hawks, cranes, and waterfowl are daytime travelers, most migrants—including the vast majority of songbirds—are on the wing in the dark. The reasons include a calmer atmosphere, guidance from the stars, and safety from predators. Meanwhile we humans by and large have no inkling of the tremendous journeys made while we sleep. Even for those who study migration, the story is unfolding in ways never before possible.

Accompaniment ...

Happy Birthday, Franz Liszt

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practice four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad, you will find me an artist!

Franz Liszt, born on this day in 1811

Vladimir Horowitz plays Liszt's Consolation No. 3 ...

Happy Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this day in 1772

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Arthur Rimbaud

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854, from "Alchemy of the Word"

Attentiveness.

Chatham, Grass Fires, 1989

Gullies, hummocks in swamps, swales in the middle of large fields, the small alluvial fan created by feeder creeks, undercut riverbanks, miniature springs, dense thickets on the tops of hills; like Bachelard’s attics, seashells, drawers, cellars, these places are a balm to me.  Magic is equated to the quality of attentiveness.

Jim Harrison, from “Passacaglia on Getting Lost”

Mad.

Happy Birthday, e.e. cummings

To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.

As for expressing, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. 

Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We, all of us, do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

e.e. cummings, born on this day in 1894

Remembering.

Anders, Earthrise, 1968

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered ... On the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

Elie Wiesel, from his 1986 Nobel lecture, "Hope, Despair and Memory"

Happy Birthday, Sammy Hagar

Sammy Hagar was born on this day in 1947.

"Turn Up the Music"...

Same.

Do we see the same sky as Crazy Horse?

Jim Harrsion, from "Passacaglia on Getting Lost"

Steve Winwood, "Dear Mr. Fantasy"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Sing.

An Oyster Months anthem to learn and sing ...

Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, Z. 339

Antonin Rondepierre performs "Here the Deities Approve" with theorbist Gabriel Rignol ...

Fun.

It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

Seneca, from On the Shortness of Life