The three panel window in my new apartment has endowed me with a gorgeous panoramic view of
Cambridge: the tree lined streets (now radiating with fall colours) and the many steeples that dot this city all the way to Harvard square, set against the backdrop of the lush elevated hills that surround Boston. Every day as I work I occasionally look up from my desk and stare in rapt awe at the teeming intellectual capital before me enveloped by a brooding azure sky. I especially enjoy seeing the sun set on the weekends (on evenings that I'm not at the office) mainly because for a brief moment of my torrid life I become conscious of the magnificent complexity of our environment: the
gravitational force that keeps the Earth rotating around the
Sun which is rotating around a black hole at the center of the
Milky Way galaxy, the nuclear fusion occurring on the Sun's surface to emit the intense light that travels 150 million kilometres to reach us, the
Rayleigh scattering of this light off the atmosphere that gives its blue hue, the ability of our
retina to convert these
photons into electrical signals deciphered by the
cerebral cortex that ultimately enable us to have such an experience. The sheer complexity of it all is (euphemistically) massive and made bittersweet when certain neurons fire to cause our facial muscles to twitch slightly; and we smile :) Returning to my apartment, there is a dilapidated park that always seems to draw my attention which is a popular place for local residents to bring their dogs. The owners stand idle partaking in their usually bland dose of small talk, while their dogs delight in chasing one other and hunting down plastic balls. The intensity of their childlike joy is graspable in the ferocity with which their tails wag. It is as though in these brief minutes, the whole of their evolutionary ascendence has in some ways been realized. Though oblivious to the staggering complexity that has made them experience such joy, they can nevertheless delight in it with the utmost intensity. And I observing all this from a far away distance, cognizant of such things, delight in their delight.
When I was in my early teens and had just started my enduring love affair with the piano, I chanced upon the glorious
contrapuntal music of the towering Baroque master,
Johann Sebastian Bach. One of my favorites at the time was the
Goldberg Variations, especially as I had first heard it played by one of my childhood heros, the acclaimed Canadian pianist
Glenn Gould. Gould's famous
1981 recording, made a year before his death, as I hear it again today is splendidly rich in detail & fills me with intense nostalgia. When one hears Gould's
first recording in 1955 at age 22 (his debut recording) played at a torrential tempo but still magnificently colourful and compares it to the last recording he made when he was nearly 50, the artist's maturation and fusion with the music are clearly manifest. The Goldberg Variations were first published in 1741 and have been considered to be a masterpiece of variational form: after commencing with a curt aria introducing the main theme, 30 variations of the bass line and chord progression are presented. The variations' diverse range spans slow melancholy to capricious elation with many shades in between. It is a divinely serene yet technically demanding piece and I have set myself the ambitious (yet utterly foolish) task of playing it. So here goes.