Rare. Isolated. November.

The reader in me nowadays pops his head up 'once in a super-blue-blood-moon' from what was 'once in a blue moon'. That's becoming quite an achievement. Nothing I have read over the years sticks in my brain, neither are the stuff I'm struggling to read these days. Soon, it'll be a rarity and a success if I read one good meaningful book a year. Bah! But in this comatose state, somewhere in a nook or a corner of my brain, there are a few passages, quotes, words of wisdom that manage to reverberate. Those are from the early years of reading, time when Nietzsche, Russell, Seneca were all gold to my eyes. Aside from the interesting fact that he ended up as one of the most important thinkers of 19th century for the kind of person he was, Nietzsche has been a treasure trove in the selective areas I have reached out to him for. (Now it's baffling to me that I read Nietzsche and Seneca simultaneously, that the former was all joy and pain and celebration and derogation and what-not of life, while the latter was all stoic. Seems I read just about anything fancy, like a dog keeping its mouth on everything (translate to Tamil with the right tone and you get what I'm talking about! Ha ha!)

In the wake of a long-drawn rainy day, last night was a string of incoherent moments. Two days of fever was letting go of its grip on me, the doctor's medication was doing its job. Still, for a decently strong dose, I couldn't sleep. I thought Ludovico Einaudi's 'Divenire', which has been a great peace-bringer to me on many occasions, would help calm my mind that was wavering among a million things. Lying on my back, looking up at the sky through my mind's eye, my fingers tried to imitate his movements on the piano, and the orchestra's on the violin. It felt real, so real that I could have actually been playing Divenire, Rose, Primavera, and all the other jewels of music in the album. Music is indeed so powerful if it sinks into your mind! Divenire was finished and yet sleep didn't come over me. It had been an entire hour of starting at the ceiling and playing piano and violin in the air! Oops. It was time for 'I Giorni'. That was finished too. Another hour. Oops again! But in those two hours, besides the piano and violin, Nietzsche's "hour hand of life" kept flashing in my mind repeatedly. 

Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life

Reading it for the first time so many years ago made a huge impact on me because of the profundity with which he laid out a truth - that how many of us end up being intervals and intermissions. It was something that stuck to me instantly and has never left me since. Yes, he was certainly wrong about 'speaking completely to the heart but once' part. Of course, they all do speak to us all the time. It's only that we have become so distracted and digressed in today's age that listening to them truly, even once, becomes a great deal. It's only that we have stopped listening to mother nature. But what a run I've had with all those moments of greatest significance - no dearth of love, springtime, melodies, mountains, moon, the sea. What more am I to be thankful for?

Beep! Midnight. November. 35 is just around the corner. The shock pushed me instantly into sleep. Goodnight.