Accende Lumen Sensibus

This morning I decided to listen to the Latin hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus." The hymn is a prayer to the Holy Spirit asking that He visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses. The melismatic Gregorian chant conveyed a warm, organic, spiritual feeling. Unbeknownst to me, "Veni" was a prelude to a greater piece of music, one which would fulfill the prayer of the hymn: Mahler's Symphony no. 5.

Yes, I listened to all 70 glorious minutes.

There is an ineffability about music; whatever I will say in this post will fall terribly short of what I intend to convey. In fact, this is the greatest difficulty of talking about music. There's a sort of cliche that music "says the unsayable," or that "music reveals to a man an unkown realm... a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing (E.T.A. Hoffman, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit)," or yet: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture"; or, in the words of composer Aaron Copland (who happened to be a good friend of conductor Leonard Bernstien): "Is there a meaning to music? My answer would be 'Yes.'... 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'" Nevertheless, this is a blog post, and I must use words  – I can't dance for the life of me.

What I wish to focus on is the fourth movement of the symphony, the famous Adagietto:

Watch the video. You won't ever regret it.

 This movement is unusual for a symphony, since it employs only the strings and a harp. Like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, the Adagietto is associated with sadness and death, Mahler's piece having been conducted by Bernstein during Robert Kennedy's funeral Mass and Barber's having been broadcast over and played at the funerals of such figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Princess Diana, and the two pieces also bear musical similarity. However, some recent studies indicate that Mahler never intended to convey feelings of melancholy. Rather, Mahler wrote the Adagietto as a love letter to his eventual wife, Alma Schindler. Mahler certainly didn't intend to have the movement push thirteen, fourteen minutes, since at the 1904 premiere of the symphony the Adagietto was played in seven minutes under his baton. Perhaps a reason for the gradual slowing of performances of the piece is that the piece, marked adagietto, a term which denotes a faster tempo than adagio, is also confusingly marked "Sehr langsam" (very slow) and in the score there are musical directions like "zurueckhaltend" (held back) and "zoegernd" (hesitantly).  (The difference between Elgar's 12-minute recording of his Serenade for Strings and the longer recordings of later conductors is a similar phenomenon, although Elgar's take on his famous Larghetto clocks in at the standard six minutes.)

But enough about the technical details. The Adagietto under Bernstein's baton is the most beautiful experience I've had with a piece of music in a long time. By the end of the video, I had experienced that "inexpressible longing" which music accomplishes in a musician or listener, and in the inevitable subsequent letdown I was walking as if in a trance, breathing heavily, shaking my head intermittently, and wiping tears that rimmed my eyes. The last time I had experienced something similar with a piece of music was when I listened to Eric Whitacre's "The Seal Lullaby"; the last concert piece that brought me to tears was the under-appreciated "Adagio di molto" from Sibelius' Violin Concerto. To be honest, I had listened to this piece multiple times before but was never greatly affected; in fact, the delayed effect of a music piece happens fairly often with me: Bach's solo violin sonatas and concertos, Brahms' Violin Concerto, Beethoven's late string quartets, and Shostakovich's quartets all took some time in affecting me (they aren't "cheap shots" like the banal Canon in D, the overly sentimental Meditation from "Thais," or the excessively bombastic finale of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I have to admit is still an awesome work regardless).The Adagietto has to be one of the closest copies of Plato's form of Beauty. The Adagietto conveys a greater sense of warmth, organicity, and spirituality than does "Veni Creator Spiritus," at least to my ears. Of course, they are two extremely different works – one is a concert piece, the other a sung prayer – but to me they related to each other by the Adagietto being the answer to the prayer that the Spirit  "visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses." Experiences like this are what make music worthwhile (or what makes life not "a mistake," as Nietzsche would have it). "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins says; I think Mahler's Fifth is charged with just a bit more of God's grandeur.

(As I wrote this, Mahler's Eighth was playing in the background. It may be charged with even more grandeur.)

The Gospel According to Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter is undoubtedly one of the best works of fiction I have ever read. It chronicles the life of a girl in middle-ages Norway from her childhood to her death. A pretty unappealing narrative prima facie, I know; but in the sprawling, sometimes dark storyline underlies a coherent tale of dramatis personae -- emphasis on dramatis. It's like Shakespeare in prose: that good, unless you dislike Shakespeare.
The Norway of Kristin Lavransdatter's time was a country of Catholicism, mingled with a bit of pagan superstition (having lived in the Philippines for the majority of my life, I find much to relate with), and the driving force of the story is (to over-simplify) sin. These lead to magnificent lines of dialogue about guilt and confession. Some lines induced those "chills-down-your-spine" that make reading worthwhile. And I quote (from Tina Nunally's wonderful translation):

"Kristin," the priest tried to lift her face, "you mustn't think about this now! Think about God, who sees your sorrow and your remorse. Turn to the gentle Virgin Mary, who takes pity on every sorrowful –"
"Don't you see? I drove another human being to take her own life!"
"Kristin," the priest said sternly. "Are you so arrogant that you think yourself capable of sinning so badly that God's mercy is not great enough?..." (page 381)

"Help me, Gunnulf," begged Kristin. She was white to the very edge of her lips. "I don't know my own will."
"Then say: Thy will be done," replied the priest softly.... (page 467)

"... I understood that the torment of God's love will never end as long as men and maidens are born on this earth.... And I was afraid of myself because I, an impure man, has served at his altar, said mass with impure lips, and held up the Host with impure hands. And I felt that I was like the man who led his beloved to a place of shame and betrayed her."
... "I can't, Gunnulf, I can't – when you talk like that, then I realize that I can never..."
...
"Kristin. You can never settle for anything less than the love that is between God and the soul." (page 472)

(Kristin's mother:) "What did you think... when you found out that Kristin and I – the two people you held dearest and loved the most faithfully – we had both betrayed you as much as we possibly could?"  

(Kristin's father:) "I don't think I thought much about it."

"But later on, when you kept thinking about it, as you say you did..."  

"I thought about all the times I had betrayed Christ." (page 578)

There are more, similar passages in the remaining 600 pages of the book. I also have to say that passages like these aren't the bulk of the book. There are narratives and dialogues of adventure, romance, humor, and  (what else?) politics. All part of a balanced diet.

Snapshot

I woke up this morning, picked up my phone, and on it read a bit of Chesterton's Saint Thomas Aquinas, after which I ate breakfast, and, while drinking coffee, read the first chapter of David E. Holwerda's Jesus and Israel, then started my application to UChicago, and to end the first half of the day I scrubbed the bathroom floor (for the first time in my life). My forearms are still throbbing.

I don't know why I wrote this down. Maybe it's because I excessively desire the life of the mind and so often get slapped in the face by the life of the body.

Thanks for nothing, Marcion.

Some Advice? from Screwtape

My family opened the first chapter of The Screwtape Letters last week for our daily morning read. I had read Screwtape before and didn't give my full attention to the read. At least, not until this part came up:

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life". But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modem investigation".

Well, that was timely. Economics is my first choice course at DLSU, and I really haven't read science (does attempting to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions count?). Lately, I've been wondering whether I should shift my interests to the sciences after realizing the apparently bleak situation of the liberal arts. Consequently, I've given economics, which still isn't a hard science, a high place among my preferred courses. (I've also finally decided to take up physics after a month of wondering whether I could escape high school without it.)

My mom was laughing for a good while, and I was shaking my head, shocked that Screwtape seemed to know my situation. (Perhaps that means another thing, too.)

And Other Etceteras

A friend shared an essay with me, and it's simply pure gold. It can be found here.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. The essay consists of various blunders written by college freshman the author taught. The collected malapropisms and misspellings are expertly paced, but I still found myself clutching my stomach.

If you don't have time for the whole thing, here are some hilarious highlights:

"During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged."

"Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras... Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. "

"Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients. Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic."

"The enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare wrote a book called Candy that got him into trouble with Frederick the Great."

"Among the goals of the chartists were universal suferage and an anal parliment. Voting was done by ballad."

"Germany invaded Poland, France invaded Belgium, and Russia invaded everybody."

The author, Anders Hendriksson, has also written a book Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students. A short article on Wikipedia gives some golden samples:

"Prehistoricle people spent all day banging rocks together so they could find food. This was the Stoned Age." 

"Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. The Nile was a river that had some water in it. Every year it would flood and irritate the land." 

"Magellan circumcised the globe." 

"John Calvin Klein translated the Bible into American so that the people of Geneva could read it." 

Hydra's Too Strong

Got rejected by UP. That was fast. Time for others.

I Begin Facing the Hydra

Just completed an application for the University of the Philippines College Admission Test. UP was never a first choice, but, hohoho, it's the first college I've applied to. We'll see how I do on the test (which, unlike most of the other admissions tests here, includes two sets of Filipino).
One down, but a lot more to follow. And the only fiery torch I have is to finish all the exams and applications. But it's exciting, nevertheless.