Random PreThanksgiving Activities

I have printed out the past five years of my blog, Ariseandgonow.blogspot.com, thinking to turn it into a symphony. And so I have been reading it chronologically by the year but not linearly by the post. I’m looking for themes, and I suspect that they would appear holistically, anyway, regardless of exact date and order. Though there is, perhaps, a cumulative quality to the blog—I suppose as long as I live I have the opportunity to make it grow and see it change— it is not the foundation of my autobiography but the occasional mapping of some thoughts. It is the notebook I keep, though not as regular as it could be, but as serious as it must be.

It is an interesting enterprise re-reading the work; there are places in it that please me greatly; there are places in it that I should have proof-read more carefully; and there are some postings, I suppose, that I should not have uploaded at all. Though I am, in fact, embarrassed of none. And I do think that out of this will come the symphony—though right now, I can’t imagine what it will look like, and certainly not what its sound will be.

If anyone out there has an idea of the themes for the symphony, I'd welcome a kind word for the work.

I heard a performance of the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. I’ve loved that music for quite some time. And always thought that it is founded on Jewish musical registers despite Mendelssohn’s early conversion to Christianity and even his apparent devoutness. The music was performed by a young girl of fourteen or fifteen years old. And more than the pleasure of the music was to share in the passion of the violinist whose love of the instrument, the music and performance filled the room with joy.