#339 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Saturday April 30)
Good morning,
Saturdays are reserved for music and poetry. Today I’d like to focus on some unfamiliar music and some brilliant words.
MUSIC
I’ve shared before a great series that seeks to introduce readers to great music (piano, cello, opera), all in five minutes. Much of this is “familiar” or “accessible.” This one is entitled “5 Minutes that Will Make You Love Renaissance Music,” music not as familiar to our ear. It offers uplifting voices and music generally intended to invoke the spiritual and the heavenly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/arts/music/classical-music-renaissance.html
And a moving song for Ukraine:
POETRY/INSPIRATION
The following are brilliant words that reflect on topics as relevant today as they were uttered by these three great men. Thank you to Adam Torson for these:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. ... This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
--Dwight Eisenhower, The Chance for Peace, April 16, 1953
But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.
-- Bertrand Russell, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
-- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II (1599)
Have a great weekend,
Glenn