Just came back from watching the movie, Black Swan. So unrelentingly intense! I knew it was gonna be creepy and trippy (treepy! or crippy?) but I didn’t realize just how crazy it would be. I love intense, dark, and scary movies. And there’s something so raw and suspenseful when the horrors on screen are happening in someone’s mind. It’s like you can’t distance yourself from it enough.
We needed to debrief afterwords at Tim Horton’s. 🙂 While there, we had a discussion about the connection between brilliance and sanity. It would seem that all too often the price one pays for excellence is one’s own sanity. The extreme pressures and expectations from both within and without eventually lead to a breaking point. And it would also seem that many of the truly “greats” of the past were, well, crazy. Beethoven, and well, Schumann really did end up in an asylum. But then we have J.S. Bach, one of, if not THE greatest of them all. He lead a relatively normal and robust life, lived to a ripe old age, and had 22 children. Hmm, on second thought, 22 children??! That’s a whole other level of crazy!!
Which reminds me of a joke that my seemingly super serious, straight-laced piano prof in university told us one night at a dinner after he’d consumed a couple glasses of wine…
“Why did Bach have so many children?”
“Because his organ didn’t have any stops on it!”
Heh.
Anyways, the movie was really good, and I’m glad I went, even though I’m now too wired to sleep…
To redirect my mind, and this post, onto more soothing things, I want to share another one of my favourite Christmas songs: Sarah McLachlan’s Song for a Winter’s Night. (It’s actually originally a Gordon Lightfoot song, but I heard Sarah’s version first and still like it best.) It came on at Tim Horton’s while we were there tonight, and it reminded me of how much I like it. So intimate and romantic, so full of longing. Listening to this song reminds me of the holidays that Len and I spent apart during the early years of our relationship. How much I missed him and wished we could just sit side by side, hand in hand.