Some songs

Photo (c) Carlos Garcia

When Paul Simon's 1990 song Cool Cool River soars off into its two choruses, I find myself back on the forest floor of a Honduran jungle. Why? Why is music so powerful? How?

This is worth a re-listen and read:

I believe in the future
I may live in my car
My radio tuned to
The voice of a star
Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
And these old hopes and fears
Still at my side...

And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours I feel sure
Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm
And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
For the mother's restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: Hard times?
I'm used to them
The speeding planet burns
I'm used to that
My life's so common it disappears
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

Radical Departures

“The genius,” Schopenhauer wrote in his timeless distinction between genius and talent,

lights on his age like a comet into the paths of the planets, to whose well-regulated and comprehensible arrangement its wholly eccentric course is foreign.

Unlike the work of talent, which simply exceeds in excellence the work of contemporaries and is therefore easily appreciated by them, Schopenhauer argued that a work of genius differs not in mere degree of excellence but in kind of vision. It is therefore often ridiculed or, worse yet, entirely ignored by contemporaries, to be rediscovered and appreciated only by posterity.

Adapted From: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/07/14/william-blake-john-trusler-letter/