Tuesday, May 26, 2009.

when you're down, nearly the whole world seems to want to go against you. that traffic light that turned red just when you walked to it, that stray ant that accidentally crawled on your fingers, that leaf that dropped on your head, all of them must have hated you in some way or another, you think.

but there's the antidote to it - hope.

there's this piece I listen to despite it being composed in a very simplistic manner:

Pärt's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten

Composed to mourn the death of Britten, it is actually written with the A minor scale and the A minor chord only. So throughout the piece it's more or less gloom and desperation as each string section plays a descending A minor scale in different speeds, until everything settles to an A minor chord. A bell whacks at random, illogical intervals that do not have a pattern.

Then as everything finally hits an A minor chord, everything ends.

Everything is cut off, and what's left is the reverberations of the lone bell, with a very audible C# overtone.

That overtone, that ray of joy in an otherwise gloomily hopeless surrounding, really stands out so much for being that glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

That ray of hope, that all is not lost.

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

“Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.”

hope.

Labels: Life