04 VIII 2002 - 19:27 - trivialis46

I'm young enough to be able to tell myself that what I believe is good is good and that my faith will be unshakable until the end of time.

I'm old enough not to believe it.

Of no interest to anyone who reads this: I got the letter from the fine folks at the AP board who told me that I'd gotten a 5 on my exam.

I am incapable today of sustained thought. I began to look through the books I checked out from the library yesterday -- two of them pertaining to my essay topic, fifteen of them completely irrelevant, among them a survey of the Western Armenian dialect and an old-fashioned Latin grammar -- and realized that I can, still, after a fashion, keep piling up words randomly so long as I separate them with commas read some of the Latin I'd thought I had replaced with German. This is slightly heartening, since the start of school draws near; on the other hand, there are all sorts of forms which the doctor needs to fill out, and he's going to have four days to do it, when the office now says that they'd like to have two weeks. Maybe I won't be able to enter school and I'll have to make up the first week of classes later.

Or not.

I suffer from a case of the disease which plagued the Romantics so: 'anywhere but here, anywhen but now' sums it up, and I can't help but wish it would be over, since I'm sort of unable to do anything about it for at least two more years.

I started out this entry with the sixth cello suite by Bach running through my head -- an explosion of joy, it always puts me in mind of, children running through fields juxtaposed with (curiously) orgasm. I never said my mind made healthy associations --

but the piece also has a delicious instability to it, it's always turning, running over itself to find its place. Does it ever? I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure if I'd want to be happy as that piece is -- I have a suspicion it'd be exhausting, my heart would give out.

My mind, however, would seem to have had enough of the Germans (having listened to Brahms symphonies on the way to the library and back, and even a little inside) for the weekend and is now busily pulling out the British composers' sound-files as it prepares to idealize life in the British Isles (same when but not same HERE, the brain crows triumphantly) to an extent that makes even me laugh:

and so, I've got the declamation of Britten's first cello suite running through my head, slow and measured, with (weirdly, because German composers retain their hold) Beethoven's marcia funebre from his fifth cello sonata also, and on the whole it gives off a tragic air -- the Britten defiant, the Beethoven restrained, both grieving.

Both the language of Britten (Lamento is the title of his first canto) and the music have never failed to bring me to the point of tears. Perhaps it is because, although the rest of his sections have names that are innocuous enough, I have always felt the entire thing to be an extension of that long lament, a parade of ghosts and mourners?