"A choir is a beautiful thing"

St. Peter's Choir of ~ in alphabetical order ~ Boys, Girls, Men, Women
Foreground, St. Peter's Churchyard ~ Philadelphia
Background, St. Peter's School ~ 2004
Seems I just can't stop quoting from The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Here's one more:

Journal of the Movement of the World No. 4

A choir is a beautiful thing

from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
[more on my book blog & Fortnightly]

Yesterday afternoon was my school's choir performance. In my posh neighborhood school, there is a choir: nobody thinks it's square and everyone competes to join but it's very exclusive: Monsieur Trianon, the music teacher, hand picks his choristers. The reason the choir is so successful is because of Monsieur Trianon himself. He is young and handsome and he had the choir sing not only the old jazz standards but also the latest hits, with very classy orchestration. Everyone gets all dressed up and the choir performs for the other students. Only the choir members' parents are invited because otherwise there'd be too many people. The gymnasium is always packed fit to burst as it is and there's an incredible atmosphere.

. . . the choir arrived to thundering applause, dressed in red and white with bow ties for the boys and long dresses with shoulder straps for the girls. Monsieur Trianon sat down on a high stool, his back to the audience, then raised a sort of baton with a little flashing red light at the end, silence fell nd the performance began.

Every time, it's a miracle. Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and laughter and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck -- it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of community, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion. Even the singers' faces are transformed: it's no longer Achille Grand-Fernet that I'm looking at (he is a very fine tenor), or Déborah Lemeur or Ségolène Rachet or Charles Saint-Sauveur. I see human beings, surrendering to music.

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing, I'm no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir.

When the music stops, everyone applauds, their faces all lit up, the choir radiant. It is so beautiful.

In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song. (pp 184 - 85)

PS
McCartney Brothers, Spring 2004

In the fall of 2002, Ben & Sam had a choir / field trip to Trinity on the Green and spent the weekend with the New Haven choir families. Liz, Duo, Will, and Sam Dickinson were Ben's host family; and Ben managed to leave a pair of shoes behind, which Liz put in the mail for us. We've been BPPs (best pen pals) ever since! Thanks Dickinsons!

We also like to marvel over the parallels that both our elder boys are named "William" (our Ben is actually "William Benedict") and both younger sons are named "Samuel." The two older boys have both continued to focus on their music; while the two younger, taller sons focused on collegiate football. Will coincidences never cease?

Dickinson Brothers, Christmas 2003

More choir photos at Pew #41 & Happy Easter

Factotum

Maybe I should read the book
& see the movie.
Last summer, I received the following note and word - a - day definition from my brother:

"Back when I was in the Corps, after Vietnam and Chicago,
I was assigned to 3rd Recruit Training Battalion at MCRD San Diego.
They set me up with a desk just inside the office complex where I
was supposed to "greet" and direct personnel to the correct clerk
for assistance. In addition to that I was given about 12 or 15
unrelated tasks such as ID cards, etc.
Now I find out after all these years that I had a real job title.
Wish I had known this word then!"

Brummbaer aka Sgt Carriker, USMC

********************

factotum

PRONUNCIATION:
(fak-TOH-tuhm)

MEANING:
noun: A servant or a low-level employee tasked with many things.
From Latin factotum, from facere (to do) + totus (all).
Earliest documented use: 1573.

USAGE:
"Now, a reporter trying to interview a business source
is confronted by a phalanx of factotums."
David Carr; The Puppetry of Quotation Approval;
The New York Times; Sept 16, 2012.

********************
How timely for me that my brother shared factotum when he did because I was right in the middle of reading a novel -- The Elegance of the Hedghog by Muriel Barbery -- in which I encountered this unusual word not once but twice. Without his note, I would surely have had to look it up!

In one passage, Barbery says that the housekeeper of a fancy Paris apartment "found herself reigning over a laughable kindgdom whose subjects were the cleaning lady (Manuela), the part - time butler (an Englishman), and the factotum (her husband)" (49).

In another, a young man is describing his work at a "ship's chandler's." A childhood friend asks him, "What do you actually do at your job?" And he replies: "I'm sort of a factotum, stock man and messenger boy, but I'm learning as I go along, so now from time to time they give more interesting things to like repair sails or shrouds, or put together the provision inventory" (293 - 94).

Thanks to Dave, I was able to read through those passages without skipping a beat! Of course, I still had to look up "ship's chandler." But it made more sense than it would have had he not written to share the day's vocabulary word. Thanks Dave!

For more Elegance,scroll down to
Building Well, Thrilling Quotidian and Bouquet
See also
Fortnightly & Book Blog

Building Well

"Beyond being merely a game,
Go can take on other meanings to its devotees:
an analogy for life, an intense meditation, a mirror of one's personality,
and exercise in abstract reasoning, a mental "workout"
or, when played well, a beautiful art in which black and white
dance in delicate balance across the board."
~ from the American GO Association

Above photo from: Yin Yang Principle
See also: The Philosophy of GO
Learn more: GO vs OTHELLO

****************************

Profound Thought No. 7

To build
You live
You die
These are
Consequences

from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
[more on my book blog]

. . . Other than the fact that it’s a board game and that two adversaries face off over black and white pieces, it’s as different from chess as cats are from dogs. In chess, you have to kill to win. In go, you have to build to live. . . . The aim of the game is not to eat the other, but to build the biggest territory. The rule regarding taking stones says that you can “commit suicide” if it is to take your adversary’s stones and not that you’re strictly forbidden to go anywhere you might be automatically taken. And so on. . . .

When I think of go -- Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction . . . you live, you die, these are consequences. It’s a proverb for playing go, and for life.

Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we, are I've assigned myself a new obligation. I'm going to stop undoing de . . . structing, I'm going to start building. . . . What matters is what you are doing when you die . . . I want to be building.
(pp 111, 112 - 114)
For more Elegance,
scroll down to Thrilling Quotidian and Bouquet

P.S.
Whenever Barbra Streisand sings "Play Othello,"
I always wonder, does she mean the play
by Shakespeare or the black and white board game?

Everything
I want to learn what life is for
I don’t want much, I just want more
Ask what I want and I will sing
I want everything (everything)

I’d cure the cold and the traffic jam
If there were floods, I’d give a dam
I’d never sleep, I’d only sing
Let me do everything (everything)

I’d like to plan a city, play the cello
Play at Monte Carlo, play Othello
Move into the White House, paint it yellow
Speak Portuguese and Dutch
And if it’s not too much

I’d like to have the perfect twin
One who’d go out as I came in
I’ve got to grab the big brass ring
So I’ll have everything (everything)

I’m like a child who’s set free
At the fun fair
Every ride invites me
And it’s unfair
Saying that I only
Get my one share
Doesn’t seem just
I could live as I must

If they’d
Give me the time to turn a tide
Give me the truth if once I lied
Give me the man who’s gonna bring
More of everything
Then I’ll have everything
Everything

written by Randy Scruggs & Nikki Williams
sung by Barbra Streisand

The Thrilling Quotidian

Sunrise

Thinking back to the beginning of this blog,
exactly five years ago today!
Andy Warhol: “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”

Bertrand Russell: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

Brian Andreas: "It's hardest to love the ordinary things, she said, but you get lots of opportunities to practice."

Muriel Barbery: “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”
~ from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 91 [see also Bouquet, Go, Factotum & The Tree Wins]

Susan Cheever: Little Women, Louisa May "Alcott's greatest work was so powerful because it was about ordinary things -- I think that's why it felt ordinary even as she wrote it. She transformed the lives of women into something worthy of literature. Without even meaning to, Alcott exalted the everyday in women's lives and gave it greatness."
~ from American Bloomsbury, 192

Arundhati Roy: “Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
~ from The God of Small Things
[Thanks to my friend Sheri Reda for this one!]
Moonrise

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

William Martin
The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents
[Thanks to Jason Dufair & Malcolm Eastler for this one!]

Bouquet on the Kitchen Counter

Birthday Flowers From Beata

Journal of the Movement of the World No. 7

This broken stem that for you I loved

from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
[more on my book blog & Fortnightly]

. . . I was having breakfast and looking at the bouquet on the kitchen counter. I don't believe I was thinking about anything. And that could be why I noticed the movement; maybe if I'd been preoccupied with something else, if the kitchen hadn't been quiet, if I hadn't been alone in there, I wouldn't have been attentive enough. But I was alone, and calm, and empty. So I was able to take it in.

There was a little sound, a sort of quivering in the air that went, "shhhh" very very very quietly: a tiny rosebud on a little broken stem that dropped onto the counter. The moment it touched the surface it went "puff," a "puff" of the ultrasonic variety, for the ears of mice alone, or for human ears when everything is very very very silent. I stopped there with my spoon in the air, totally transfixed. It was magnificent. But what was it that was so magnificent? I couldn't get over it: it was just a little rosebud at the end of a broken stem, dropping onto the counter. And so?

I understood when I went over and looked at the motionless rosebud where it had fallen. It's something to do with time, not space. Sure, a rosebud that has just gracefully dropped from the flower is always lovely to look at. It's so artistic: you could paint them over and over! But that doesn't explain the movement. The movement...and we think such things are spatial.

In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty. . . . I have been incredibly lucky because this morning all the conditions were ripe: an empty mind, a calm house, lovely roses, a rosebud dropping. . . . Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.

. . . does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying. (pp 272 - 73)