"Gone From My Sight"

This beautiful extract from the American poet Henry Van Dyke was read recently at a family funeral and I think it is one of the most beautiful readings on the subject I have ever heard.

It's interesting that Van Dyke was also the author of 'Joyful, joyful..' - the beautiful lyrics added to that most beautifully joyful work of Beethoven 'Ode to Joy'. I knew little about the author before, and simply from reading his words, he sounds like such a brilliant man.

"I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'
Gone where? Gone from my sight ... that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts 'Here she comes!'"

Music and Words

"Music," wrote Beethoven, "is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”

Often it seems that there are emotions and experiences beyond emotions, for which we have not yet found sufficient vocabulary. Music, like the sense of smell, is instant. Before words, before reading and letters, we experience directly through our more immediate senses of hearing and touch and smell. Words require another step...and, in some ways, a step away from that initial understanding and empathy.

Words divide and words bring together. It often seems that the greatest possible gift would be the ability to translate, immediately, into words those experiences/senses that we all share and so rarely find the means to express. What quest! What an adventure!