I spent most of today doing spreadsheets, so the language center of my brain is in hiding. Cowering, actually, under piles of numbers.
Therefore, in lieu of legitimate blog content, a few diversions:
Recent Searches That Led Folks to this Blog
- How to tie rope to opera house traps (uh, come again?)
- Kim Whitman blog (ah, my evil twin…)
- Translation volta la terrea aria
- Opera supertitles controversy
- Mezzo audition arias
And my favorite…
- Naked French audition (wonder what s/he was actually looking for…)
What I’m Giving Up for Lent
OK, this may sound facetious and somewhat frivolous but it’s not; primarily because of what this particular Lenten discipline will accomplish if it’s achievable.
For the 40 days of Lent (plus the 5 Sundays therein), I will not take my work home. The laptop stays in the office. The browser on the home computer will neither be pointed toward web exchange server, nor Blogger, nor Twitter.
This means I have to be ruthlessly efficient at work, and I have to be willing to face the consequences if I can’t meet a deadline. It just so happens that March and April may be the absolute only time of the year when I could actually even attempt such an experiment. And it may come to partial grief. But it’s worth a try.
Noise
And finally, a Thomas Merton quote that a thoughtful colleague sent to me in response to this post. Thanks, JL.
“Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion.”
Thomas Merton. No Man Is An Island
Thank you for that quote. It is constantly – CONSTANTLY – easy to lose perspective about everything, but especially about the “noise” we make in this business. To think about singing as ‘interrupting the silence’ gives it a humbling quality, the justification to exist only when absolutely imperative. Whew. It is really just what I needed to hear.