It sure is. RTWT. Twice.
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.
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:
That was - - - just - - - - -
ReplyDeletejust - - - Wow!
You know what it reminds me of? Torvill and Dean in Sarajevo in 1984.
ReplyDeleteM
Mark, Torvill and Dean used the same music in their performance.
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