Bernard Parmegiani - De Natura Sonorum (1978)

 

Many years ago, when, at the cost of my capacity for experiencing deep sadness, I completed my reading in Plato’s dialogues, whereupon the loss of all my doubt seemed to me an unjust punishment, as if a part of me had been rendered into something inaccessible, untouchable, indistinctive. Even a week ago, despite a deeper appreciation for temperate Plato, and all the reading that followed, the familiarity with the meaning of statecraft, the place of philosophy in that mechanism, like grand Prussian musical compositions of the late-eighteenth-century aspiring to a new unity, a new absolute, a new state!—trying to listen to the voice that would proclaim my place! After all this, and more, I remained perplexed and disoriented: my place was after all incomprehensible and unjustifiable! In the last half century (even more!) I have experienced much, many joys, astonishments, and a few sorrows. I grew older. I experienced life. I learned new languages (chiefly Renaissance Italian, soon forgotten, but to be replaced by a return to Elizabethan English (Francis Bacon, thank goodness, to return to that, like a homecoming!), then I explored new cultures of learning anew. I moved away from the English Renaissance, due to lack of time, lack of courage, for fear of finding myself thinking too much. My last important investigation in that demesne was Sir Philip Sydney. That was surely the capital atop the pillar.  I'm still in a non-thinking phase. I feel, and even if I feel those feelings are nothing. Everything seems banal to me, even if that everything is unpleasant, and yet I rejoice at that authenticity! I get emotional, I remember, I am moved, I cry out, I lurch—but it is like watching an old film that I have seen many times—albeit many times long ago. I understood that I was in a delicate, perhaps precarious position, a sort of chronic dissatisfaction with my emotional needs, which were paradoxically no longer linked to my sense of value, even though I had won the respect of a multitude of intellectual communities. Maybe it is a coincidence, but posting in this blog, revising my words, and today presenting this grand composition, Parmegiani’s glorious De Natura Sonorum, seem like reaching out to make contact (with YOU) for the very first time. I am far from understanding who my readers are, but I find those old time-worn communities, the just moderators of those important corrals, still just as new, just as discreet, just as profound. Yet not satisfying, but fulfilling my sense of propriety, my ability as a human to choose to do what is right regardless of consequences or even what’s in my own personal best interest. I do know what all this means, whether the future of old relationships, the evolution of new communities, and so on, are hidden or not among the many blog posts I have set forth here, for you, the millions of readers who buy my books (see the right margin of this blog, and click and purchase all of my books, thank you). Join me, and take note of the change that has occurred within me, your patronage will (and must!) preserve my testimony, and the many particular intentions that I have intended, so as to remind myself, howsoever long it takes, that I have NOT resigned myself and that I have always tried to understand my fellow humans and the things of this world.