Years of Poems and Spirits

Listening to Uchida’s playing Chopin’s Sonata 3/op. 58 in the background. Not aware that I set the player in the “repeat” mode, until suddenly I realized how beautiful it is.

I bought the disc after listening to it on the radio while driving. Somehow, listening to music while in motion gives me a very different sensibility. It doesn’t matter that the car or the radio is over ten years old or the road I drive on is a beat-up freeway. Nor is there anything special in the ambient scenery or smell. Somehow, music gets to me the easiest while I am driving. In the last couple of years, almost all the discs I discovered are through this way. Sometimes I stopped and listened, but it didn’t feel the same.

Flight doesn’t give me the same sensation quite yet. But there are magic moments. Once on my way to Indianapolis,  I sat at the exit row by the window all by myself.  The iPod was playing the Adagio in Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto.  As the plane started a long and soft descent, the prairie below seemed like rolling up the horizon to embrace us.  At the same time,  the setting sun and intermittent breezes created a show of golden waves with the dark-green grass outside of the window (it must be late fall by then). The music was heavenly too.

Reading the Federalist Papers recently but didn’t register any emotion or excitement. At least not enough to inspire a blog entry. Yet reading a short story about unreserved love, now I found myself quite moved. I must have mellowed with age.