Motus Mentis

It’s too late for a serious effort here tonight: the memsahib and I spent the evening in Prospect Park, enjoying the New York Philharmonic’s annual outdoor concert.

It was a splendid event, and well worth the arduous half-block trek to the park. The weather, by some freak accident, was delightful, with balmy breezes and a spectacular sunset, and the program could hardly have been better: Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Sibelius’s Finlandia, with the rousing overture from Carmen as an encore, and an exuberant fireworks display to cap off the show.

The Bach in particular, played just as the sun sank below the horizon, was so very beautiful. It would be easy, in the presence of such sublime genius, such staggering artistic splendor, such incomparable musicianship, to imagine that such gifts must be a clear sign of a transcendent and loving Mind from which such blessings flow, that they simply must come to us from some higher source than the coarse material processes of the natural world.

Naaaaaaaaah.