Peter Frampton, "All I Want to Be (Is By Your Side)"

Happy Birthday, Phil Manzanera

Phil Manzanera was born on this day in 1951.

"On an Island," with David Gilmour ...

Dared.

In January, Lake Erie froze nearly to Canada. One evening, standing before its ominous expanse in my ice skates, with a wool cap pulled over my ears and a long scarf wound around my neck and crisscrossed over my chest beneath my blue Navy-surplus pea jacket, I left the shore. I planned to face down the spectre of my fear by going as far as I dared toward Canada, or the Livingston ship channel if the icebreaker had been through. 

I hoped that my love of skating would propel me through the worst of my worries ...

Tom McGuane, from "Ice"

Happy Birthday, Franz Schubert

Rieder, Franz Schubert, 1825

Franz Schubert was born on this day in 1797.

Members of the Vienna Philharmonic perform "The Trout," Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 ...

Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2

Sir Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra ...

 

Priority.

But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something ...

There is always rivalry, and there is always a search for means of exploiting the means of advancing one's own position. In other ages, one paid court to the king. Now we pay court to the people. In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.

William F. Buckley Jr., from "The Demagogues Are Running"

Warns.

"Don't Be a Sucker" is a 1943 U.S. Army Signal Corps film that warns Americans about the dangers of bigotry, hate speech, and demagoguery by showing how they mirrored the rise of Nazism in Germany ...

Happy Birthday, Thomas Merton

In an age when totalitarianism has striven, in every way, to devaluate and degrade the human person, we hope it is right to demand a hearing for any and every sane reaction in favor of man's inalienable solitude and his interior freedom. The murderous din of our materialism cannot be allowed to silence the independent voices which will never cease to speak. It is all very well to insist that man is a "social animal" -- the fact is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine -- or in a religious one either, for that matter.

In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one's own reality and one's ability to give himself to society -- or to refuse that gift.

When men are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by impersonal forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their dignity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment, and hate.

No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to men about God and love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of the Gospel are hidden in man's heart, and those ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence.

In other words, since faith is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality and without their rightful integrity as persons.

Thomas Merton, born on this day in 1915, from Thoughts in Solitude

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

Styx, "Borrowed Time"

Lowenbrau pitchers are the lunch special ...

Listening.

Laura Cannell, "Summon the Ghost Horses"

Filled.

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College"

Truth.

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An "ideology" is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And to show that some concept—holiness, justice, beauty, or whatever—is ideological, is to undermine its claim to objectivity. It is to suggest that there is no such thing as holiness, justice or beauty, but only the belief in it—a belief that arises under certain social and economic relations and plays a part in cementing them, but which will vanish as conditions change.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Blessed.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where others see nothing.

Camille Pissarro

Done.

Done and done.

Dare.

The MENTAL TRAVELLER

I travelled through a land of men,

A land of men and women too,

And heard and saw such dreadful things

As cold earth wanderers never knew.

For there the babe is born in joy

That was begotten in dire woe,

Just as we reap in joy the fruit

Which we in bitter tears did sow;

And if the babe is born a boy

He’s given to a woman old,

Who nails him down upon a rock,

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,

And pierces both his hands and feet,

And cuts his heart out of his side

To make it feel both cold & heat.

Her fingers number every nerve

Just as a miser counts his gold;

She lives upon his shrieks and cries—

And she grows young as he grows old,

Till he becomes a bleeding youth

And she becomes a virgin bright;

Then he rends up his manacles

And pins her down for his delight.

He plants himself in all her nerves

Just as a husbandman his mould,

And she bcomes his dwelling-place

And garden, frutiful seventyfold.

An aged shadow soon he fades,

Wandering round and earthly cot,

Full filled all with gems and gold

Which he by industry had got.

And these are the gems of the human soul:

The rubies and pearls of a lovesick eye,

The countless gold of an aching heart,

The martyr’s groan, and the lover’s sigh.

They are his meat, they are his drink:

He feeds the beggar and the poor

And the wayfaring traveller;

For ever open is his door.

His grief is their eternal joy,

They make the roofs and walls to ring—

Till from the fire on the hearth

Alittle female babe does spring!

And she is all of solid fire

And gems and gold, that none his hand

Dares stretch to touch her baby form,

Or wrap her in his swaddling-band.

But she comes to the man she loves,

If young or old, or rich or poor;

They soon drive out the aged host,

A beggar at another’s door.

He wanders weeping far away

Until some other take him in;

Oft blind and age-bent, sore distressed,

Until he can a maiden win.

And to allay his freezing age

The poor man takes her in his arms:

The cottage fades before his sight,

The garden and its lovely charms;

The guests are scattered through the land

(For the eye altering, alters all);

The senses roll themselves in fear,

And the flat earth becomes a ball,

The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away—

A desert vast without a bound,

And nothing left to eat or drink

And a dark desert all around.

The honey of her infant lips,

The bread and wine of her sweet smile,

The wild game of her roving eye

Does him to infancy beguile.

For as he eats and drinks he grows

Younger and younger every day;

And on the desert wild they both

Wander in terror and dismay.

Like the wild stag she flees away;

Her fear plants many a thicket wild,

While he pursues her night and day,

By various arts of love beguiled.

By various arts of love and hate,

Till the wide desert planted o’er

With labyrinths of wayward love,

Where roams the lion, wolf and boar,

Till he becomes a wayward babe

And she a weeping woman old.

Then many a lover wanders here,

The sun and stars are nearer rolled,

The trees bring forth sweet ecstasy

To all who in the desert roam,

Till many a city there is built,

And many a pleasant shepherd’s home.

But when they find the frowning babe

Terror strikes through the region wide;

They cry, ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!’

And flee away on every side.

For who dare touch the frowning form

His arm is withered to its root,

Lions, boars, wolves, all howling flee

And every tree does shed its fruit;

And none can touch that frowning form,

Except it be a woman old;

She nails him down upon the rock,

And all is done as I have told.

William Blake

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Bernardo Bellotto

Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West, 1758

Bernardo Bellotto was born on this day in 1720.

Letizia Treves, curator England's National Gallery, introduces the exhibition, Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited ...

Stop.

Hang.

'Tis Winter 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, order an extra side of ranch for the chicken nachos and listen to Wings, "Hi, Hi, Hi' ...

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

Phony Beatlemania is still way overrated.

Thanks to Steve for the inspiration.

The Jam, "Going Underground"

The public gets what the public wants

But I want nothing this society's got ...

Privateness.

Pears, The Student Travels Underground, 1930

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and

retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For

expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. 

Francis Bacon, from "Of Studies"

Ice.

Ice boating on Lake Leelanau, God's Country ...

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Nameless.

VINCULUS' SONG

I reached out my hand, England's rivers turned and flowed the other way...

I reached out my hand, my enemies's blood stopt in their veins...

I reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies' heads like a flock of starlings;

My enemies crumpled like empty sacks.

I came to them out of mists and rain;

I came to them in dreams at midnight;

I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;

When they thought themselves safe I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood...

The rain made a door for me and I went through it;

The stones made a throne for me and I sat upon it;

Three kingdoms were given to me to be mine forever;

England was given to me to be mine forever.

The nameless slave wore a silver crown;

The nameless slave was a king in a strange country...

The weapons that my enemies raised against me are venerated in Hell as holy relics;

Plans that my enemies made against me are preserved as holy texts;

Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell's sacristans and placed in a vessel of silver and ivory.

I gave magic to England, a valuable inheritance

But Englishmen have despised my gift

Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;

Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;

In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it...

Two magicians shall appear in England...

The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;

The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;

The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;

The second shall see his dearest posession in his enemy's hand...

The first shall pass his life alone, he shall be his own gaoler;

The second shall tread lonely roads, the storm above his head, seeking a dark tower upon a high hillside...

I sit upon a black throne in the shadows but they shall not see me.

The rain shall make a door for me and I shall pass through it;

The stones shall make a throne for me and I shall sit upon it...

The nameless slave shall wear a silver crown

The nameless slave shall be a king in a strange country...

Susanna Clarke, from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Conditions.

Anton Chekhov from a letter to his brother 1886 ...

You have been gifted from above with something most others lack : you have talent. That talent sets you above millions of people, for here on earth there is only one artist to every two million men.  That talent puts you on a plane apart, and even if you were a toad or a tarantula you would still be respected, for all is forgiven to talent. You have only one failing. But in it lies the source of your false position, your misery, and even of your intestinal catarrh. That failing is your utter lack of culture.  

Do excuse me, but veritas magis amicitiae, for life imposes certain conditions.  To feel at ease among intelligent folk, not to be out of place in such company, and not to feel this atmosphere to be a burden upon oneself, one must be cultured in a particular way.  Your talent has thrust you into this charmed circle, you belong to it, but you are impelled away from it and find yourself forced to waver between these cultured people and your neighbors. The vulgar flesh cries out in you, that flesh raised on the birch rod, in the beer cellar, on free meals.  To overcome this background is difficult - terribly difficult.

In my opinion people of culture must meet the following requisites ...

Thankful.

The Reverend Dr. Cornel West, interviewed on The Skeptic's Guide to Enlightenment ...

My beloved mother had a favorite a moment in the biblical text that’s Thessalonian, the fifth chapter, where Paul talks about being thankful in all circumstances. You say, how could that be? That makes absolutely no sense. Thankful, gratitude, piety, and acknowledgement of the blessings owing to the sources for good in your life in terms of the kind of father and mother that you had, over which you had no control, or the kind of grandparents you had, or the kind of friends you encounter, or the kind of text that you read, the kind of music that you listen to.

We’re grateful for Beethoven. Grateful for Aretha Franklin. Why? Because they’re sources of good in our lives. We’re thankful for Schiller, we’re thankful for Paul Salaam and his torturous poetic wrestling with catastrophe. We’re thankful to Mark Twain and Herman Melville and Tony Morrison and Chekhov. Of course, Chekhov is my favorite, so I won’t go anywhere beyond that. That’s about as deep as you can get.

But you’re thankful that they laid bare in their lives and in their works and with their words the source of joy. That’s a love and a joy that go hand in hand. Yes, with the sense of joy and gratitude and thankfulness.

Kurt has Buckley on the same. 

Happy Birthday, Anton Chekhov

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Anton Chekhov, born on this day in from "The Bet"

Guarantee.

Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

Thomas Paine, from The Rights of Man

Happy Birthday, Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius was born on this day in 1862.

"Winter Night Sleigh Ride"...

Wander through Delius: Apostle of Nature.

Laura Cannell, Antiphony of the Trees

Different.

Miracle: The Boys of '80 comes out tomorrow.

Our approach to the game was gonna be entirely different ...

Published.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

    While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

            Only this and nothing more" ...

Edgar Allan Poe, from "The Raven," published on this day in 1845

Happy Birthday, Thomas Paine

Jarvis, Thomas Paine, 1809

Government with insolence is despotism; but when contempt is added it becomes worse; and to pay for contempt is the excess of slavery. 

Thomas Paine, born on this day in 1737, from "Rights of Man"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, King Tubby

King Tubby was born on this day in 1941.

An excellent album ...

Grants.

EMBARKING on the STUDY of ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR

I, after fifty generations

(Time opens such gulfs out to us all)

Return to the far bank of a mighty river

The Norsemen's longships never reached,

To the harsh, hard-wrought words

Which, with a tongue now long gone to dust,

I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia

Before becoming Haslam1 or Borges.

Last Saturday, we read how Julius Cæsar

Was the first to come from Romeburg to unveil Britain;

Before the grapes grow back, I shall have heard

The nightingale of the riddle

And the elegy spoken by the twelve

Warriors round their king's burial mound.

To me, these words seem symbols of other symbols,

Variants of German or English-to-be,

But they were once images of the actual

Used by a man to proclaim a sword or the sea;

Tomorrow they will come alive again,

Tomorrow, fyr will not be fire, but rather that lot

Of tamed and changeling god

Whom none can face without feeling an ancient fear.

Glory be to the unending weft

Of cause and effect

Which, before showing me the mirror

In which I shall see no one or some other,

Grants me this perfect contemplation

Of a language at its dawn.

Jorge Luis Borges, 

Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra in E-Flat Major, K. 364 (320d)

Julian Rachlin conducts the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra and plays the fiddle, while Sarah McElravy answers on the viola ...

Is.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.

William Blake

Between.

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.

William Blake

Avoid the door enticingly labeled "control" ... it won't open.

Use.

Booth, Discovery En Route to Antarctica (detail), 2014

Lapham's Quarterly reminds us that man is the maker ...

We do nobody any favors by outsourcing the acts of discovery to machines. The suggestion runs counter to the arrogant belief that machines are the salvation of the human race, technology the light and wonder of the world. The prophecy is false, but the sales promotion is relentless. The data-mining dwarfs in Silicon Valley praise the glories of artificial intelligence and the internet of things, talk about attaching a human consciousness to a computer that lives forever. The Pentagon recruits drones to wage and lose its wars, Wall Street hires bots to mint and spoil its money; in the nation’s schools, the curriculum known as STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) sweeps the classrooms clean of improvised literary devices, downgrades the study of history and the humanities because they don’t get along well with tests administered by computers. At our colleges and universities, the oracles in residence complacently assume that man’s machines have vanquished nature, commodified the tribes of Paleolithic instinct, will construct Elon Musk’s stairway to the stars. The humanities they construe as exquisite ornaments, meant to be preserved together with the alumni slush fund and naming opportunities, in the vaults of the endowment. Their piety recalls the lines of Archibald MacLeish:

Freedom that was a thing to use

They’ve made a thing to save

And staked it in and fenced it round

Like a dead man’s grave.

To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. 

Simple.

While I have the gravest doubts about the durability of any of my writing, few can beat me at the graceful dance of knife, fork, and spoon across the plate or the capacity to make a pickle last as long as a sandwich. I have thought of rigging tiny lights to my eating utensils and getting myself filmed while eating in the near dark: imagine, if you will, the dancelike swirl of these points of light. Just last evening in my cabin, the performance took place over a humble, reduced-calorie Tuscan stew (very lean Muscovy duck, pancétta, white beans, copious garlic, fresh sage, and thyme). Since I was alone in the twilight, the applause rang a bit hollow.

To be sure, our limitations strangle us, letting us know who we are. On a semireligious level, normally we have a secret animal we favor, but this is dangerous territory. Never tell a government official your secret animal, since it will one day be used against you. On a more mundane plateau, if you were a boat, what kind of boat would you be? You must be honest, since I can't interrogate you, what with each of us being alone. No dream boats, grand sloops, ghostly galleons, if you please. As for me, and I'm doing the writing here, I have long confessed to being a tugboat: slow, rather stubby, persistent, functional, an estuarine creature that avoids open water.

Jim Harrison, from "The Tugboats of Costa Rica"

I'd be -- I am -- a simple Sunfish.

Still.

Is it not possible that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?

Virginia Woolf

Thomas Dolby, "Windpower"

Cleavage.

PBS' FRONTLINE on Holocaust education in Germany ...

When you discuss this subject in your classrooms at the university level, how would you characterize the reactions and the responses of the students. How engaged are they?

You can really see a cleavage among students both of the third and fourth post-Holocaust generational cohorts. Of course, students who take classes on a voluntary basis on the Holocaust are usually more interested in the subject than other students; it's a self selected group already because courses on the Holocaust are not required courses in any field on the university level, so my experiences are certainly not representative. But still, the cleavage which I perceive in my classroom corresponds to cleavages observed in the qualitative research colleagues and I have conducted.

There are those students in the classroom who are more committed to learning about the Holocaust, to doing more research about the perpetrators' motives and the suffering of the victims, than maybe in any other previous generation of Germans. They intend to learn about anti-Semitism, including the anti-Semitism of their grandparents, a taboo topic in the debates of former decades which focused on Hitler's guilt or anonymous bureaucratic modern structures which were held responsible for Auschwitz. So there is a substantial amount of students who really want to know how it happened and how it could happen, and who were the culprits and the victims.

But then you also have a fair amount of students who are more strongly opposing Holocaust remembrance than previous generations. They seek a "normal" German national identity and feel the Holocaust is too much of a burden, not an important part of German history, and that it has been over-represented in the media and public discourse. [Those who] are looking for a conventional national German identity or "German pride," tend to split off the Holocaust as a "general phenomenon" similar to crimes of all other nations. They tend to reject a post-conventional moral understanding of history and identity which reflects that the Holocaust -- this unprecedented crime and genocide -- is indeed part of one's German collective self-identity and self-image, and it needs to be because you can neither rewrite history nor escape the fact that you are shaped by your social and cultural background.

The challenge is to self-reflect this criminal aspect of German history, including anti-Semitism. Those students who fully accept this particular responsibility and legacy tend to develop cosmopolitan, universalistic ethical values and post-national identities.But those students who say "I want to be proud of my country again and proud about our history" rather tend to -- and we have very substantial empirical studies about this -- not be interested in the Holocaust, not wanting to learn about it. They feel it is a burden which is superimposed to them by "others," and they tend to identify with rather conventional norms, ethnic identity narratives and moral systems.

Humanity in Action on "The Responsibility of Knowledge: Developing Holocaust Education for the Third Generation" ...

First, the goal of Holocaust education is to instruct the public “never to forget.” Second, the education is necessary to“develop competencies so that it never happens again.” Thus, Holocaust education, she believes, can be a tool for teaching democracy. As for the status quo, however, she laments that currently, Holocaust education only “imbues a sense of history, while human rights education gives the power to act.” Ideally, the two should not be mutually exclusive.

Frederick Douglass on memory ...

“In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator,” [Frederick Douglass] said at the conclusion of his dedication speech, “we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us ... it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.”

Think.

From The Monuments Men ...

I'll think about my cigarette, and I'll think about you, sitting there with that stupid look on your face, I'll finish my coffee, leave the paper for Sid to wrap fish in and I'll never think of you again ...

Freedom.

Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1810

Steve reminds us that life is a mystery to be lived ... 

Story conveys the reality of human freedom, for although "real," our freedom is limited, and although "limited," our freedom is real ... 

We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.

Responsible.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor Frankel, from Man's Search for Meaning

Never.

Artificial intelligence can tell us that Socrates said, "The unexamined life isn't worth living," but­­ A.I. hasn't a clue about what life is.  Life is the mind of man, nature looking creatively back on itself, setting forth on voyages of discovery.  Harrison taking life in large doses of rivers, forests, fish, grouse, thickets, dogs; Walt Whitman, vast and containing multitudes, yawping down the open road, embracing the common air and the profound individual; Mozart, alone, in good cheer, ideas flowing abundantly as he walks or lies awake, hearing the full symphony at once in his mind, humming dainty morsels into finished, joyful form, a delight beyond words.

In such silence and stillness the mind wanders wide ... and wonders never cease.

Faith.

It's Holocaust Remembrance Day ...

There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.

Elie Wiesel, from Night

Happy Birthday, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart

Lange, Mozart, 1790

Mozart was born on this date in 1756.

Juanjo Mena conducts an unknown orchestra featuring Ángel Luis Sánchez Moreno, oboe, Carlos Ferreira, clarinet, Jesus Viedma, bassoon, and Pablo Fernandez, horn, in a performance of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds in E Flat Major, K297b  ...

Liberated.

On this date in 1945, the Nazi concentration camp and extermination facility at Auschwitz was liberated.

From PBS' Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State ...

As the Soviet army approached and the end of the war came closer the vast majority of Auschwitz prisoners were marched west by the Nazis, into Germany. Those few thousand remaining were thought too ill to travel, and were left behind to be shot by the SS. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the camp, the SS left them alive. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened.

"They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell."

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's history is HERE.

He struck me as a normal person, that was the horrible thing about it. He was cool, objective, matter of fact. "This is my war duty. I did my war duty. It was like I had to go out and cut down so many trees. So I went out and took my saw and cut the trees down." He was just acting like a normal, unimportant individual.

He simply answered the questions, and as far as I could tell, told what happened without emotion. Without emotion. Without a sense of guilt. Not in the slightest apologetic, not in the remotest degree was he apologetic. In a sense, I think he showed a certain pride in accomplishment.

Whitney Harris, member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials

Always.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, General MacArthur

"Fudge the regulations!" he charged. "They're sometimes made to be broken for the good of the whole. Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind."

General Douglas MacArthur, born on this day in 1880, from MacArthur Close Up

Jimmy Buffett, "Turn Up the Heat and Chill the Rose"

You need some imagination to deal with temperature fluctuation ...

Excellent.

Excellent albums, Sly & Robbie at their best ...