a post-Orts note
- a post-Orts note -
I have only recently discovered that some of you have been responding to my Orts sendings over the years, and that your messages have been piling up in a Replies section in my TinyLetter account, where I don’t see them unless I go looking for them.
Oddly, some of your messages have come through as ordinary emails, but the vast majority haven’t, with the result that I now have an archive of 1,159 unread messages going back to July 2014, which is when I began using TinyLetter (a poor cousin of the redoubtable MailChimp) to send out Orts each week.
My apologies to any amongst you who may have worried or felt slighted by my lack of response! *
Skimming through this vast treasure I note many expressions of appreciation, by which I am humbled and for which I am sincerely grateful, and a great many intriguing comments, counter-quotes, links to related stuff, etc. etc. etc.— all of which I’m now seeing for the first time.
It’s a very rich trove, and I intend to sift through it systematically, if belatedly.
I will be unable to resist sharing with you some of what I come up with.
For starters, a reminder of this link
https://youtu.be/4JJB7dCCQ7w
to a happy young string quartet, which was part of Orts #714 (April 2015)
and this link from my left-coast cousin
https://youtu.be/6s0Mp7LFI-k
to a splendid visualization of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge
and this link to his lovely memoir about Vienna, from an occasional correspondent:
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-homing-instinct/
and this remark, à propos of I know not what, from another occasional respondent:
“without insects we would be knee deep in dead things.”
Here’s what else is on my mind. The body is a fragile vessel, and the mind is an unreliable companion on the voyage. There is no stable reality, and the persistent sense we have of a continuing self is a delusion. A convincing and perhaps necessary delusion, but a delusion nonetheless.
The Buddhists nailed it. One of their best known texts, the Diamond Sutra, ends with this verse:
Thus shall ye think of all this Fleeting World:
a Star at Dawn, a Bubble in a Stream,
a Flash of Lightning in a Summer Cloud,
A Flick’ring Lamp, a Phantom, and a Dream.
(I would love to know who rendered this verse in English iambic pentameter! but googling hasn’t got me the answer. Maybe one of you can find out and let me know. I’d be eternally grateful.)
* To avoid further messages that I don’t see until years later, please send any email intended for me to
ccccurmudgeon@gmail.com and not simply as a reply to an Orts or After-Orts message!
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