Books to the Ceiling

Ron and I spent Easter Sunday at home, just the two of us. We made beef bourgignon and listened to music. First, the Mozart symphonies, starting with number twenty. We made our way through to the mid-thirties before switching gears and putting on the ‘Prelude and Good Friday Spell’ from the opera Parsifal by Richard Wagner.

The Mozart symphonies were performed by the Prague Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The recordings were made in the early 1990’s. The clarity and exuberance of the playing - perfectly captured by Telarc, that home of sonic wonders! - fills the house.

The delicious aromas of the mingling stew components are equally pervasive. As dinnertime draws near, we put on the Wagner. I like to listen to this at Easter time. The recording we have features the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by the great Bruno Walter. Here is what the liner notes - uncredited, alas - say about this music:

“Like Tannhauser, the last of Wagner’s music dramas, Parsifal is built around a story of the Knights of the Holy Grail, and concerns itself with the conflict of spirituality and earthly passion. It contains some of the greatest music Wagner ever wrote, particularly the spiritual Prelude and one of the most awe-inspiring religious pieces of music ever penned–the ‘Good Friday Spell’ in Act III.”

This recording, released by Columbia Masterworks, was made in 1959. It is the only version of this sublime masterwork that I will ever need to own.

If there is one thing I have learned in my life, it is cherish days like yesterday for their simplicity and for the peace and love with which they are filled.

“Genesis” is the first essay in E.L. Doctorow’s collection Creationists. In it Doctorow makes a provocative observation on the art of the storyteller: “If not in all stories than certainly in mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending.”

Later, there is this passage:

“The cosmology of Genesis is beautiful and for all we know may even turn out to be as metaphorically prescient as some believers think it is. One imagines the ancient storytellers convening to consider what they had to work with: day and night, land and sea, earth and sky, trees that bore fruit, plants that bore seed, wild animals, domesticated animals, birds, fish, and everything that crept. In their brilliant imaginations, inflamed by the fear and love of God, it seemed more than possible that these elements and forms of life, this organization of the animate and inanimate, would have been produced from a chaos of indeterminate dark matter by spiritual intent–here was the story to get to the ending–and that it was done by a process of discretion, the separation of day from night, air from water, earth from sky, one thing from another in a, presumably, six-day sequence culminating in the human race.”

This essay was originally written for the Pocket Canons Bible Series, published in 1999 by Grove Press.

In a section of Classics for Pleasure entitled The English Religious Tradition, Michael Dirda quotes a passage from the Gospel of Luke, as rendered in the King James Bible.I love what he says after the quoted passage:

“The solemn harmonies of such prose are largely ignored in these days of text-messaging and political newspeak. Nonetheless, sometimes only the full organ roll of liturgical English can match the sacredness of weddings, funerals, and religious holy days.”

Dirda then goes on to quote from The Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Burial of the Dead:

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we be in death…”

This seems bleak to the point of hopelessness. Where is the consolation? But wait…”These magnificently somber phrases eventually build to one of the great climaxes in English literature:

‘Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, and that in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye by the last trump. For the trump shall blow, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed….Death where is thy sting? Hell where is thy victory?’”

Surely in the annals of great oratory there is a straight line from this triumphant declaration of faith to Martin Luther King Jr’s equally triumphant “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”