Friday, August 19, 2011

Beautiful, redux

Would that we had such an emergent meme each and every day, but Eric Raymond has a post so filled with beauty and triumph that it's simply impossible to summarize.  I'll offer only a single nibble of temptation:

These musicians took heritage art, pried it out of its stuffy conventional box, and made it shine again. And the audience understood what they were doing. The 2500-year conversation we call Western civilization is made of moments like this, when we connect with the best of our past and re-purpose it for the present and the future. And that conversation is not over; our capacity for keeping that best, casting off the junk and accretions around it, and using it in fresh ways it is still with us.

...

I looked at those musicians and that audience, and what I didn’t see was decadence or exhaustion or self-hating multiculturalism. I felt like pumping my fist in the air and yelling “This is my civilization!” It lives, and it’s beautiful, and it’s worth defending.
It sure is.  RTWT.  Twice.

3 comments:

Roger said...

That was - - - just - - - - -
just - - - Wow!

Mark Alger said...

You know what it reminds me of? Torvill and Dean in Sarajevo in 1984.

M

Borepatch said...

Mark, Torvill and Dean used the same music in their performance.