The Sun Sets, The Sun Rises: A New Day
I returned graded papers to my class yesterday. As usual, they opened their papers and glanced at my comments. Then the weirdest thing happened. They all just sat there, as the life seemed to drain from the room. No apparent irritation, no complaints; just shell shock. Then, I had to almost lead them from the room by their hand.
\*/ Posted: 6:04 AM | Permalink
Here [in Fidelio] and nowhere else music becomes a rosy dawn, militant religious, the dawning of a new day so audible that it seems more than simply hope. It shines forth as the pure work of Man, as one which had not appeared in the world surrounding Beethoven, a world that existed irrespective of men. Thus music as a whole stands at the farther limits of humanity, but at those limits where humanity, with new langauge and haloed by the call to achieved intensity, to the attained world of "we," is first taking shape. And this ordering in our musical expression means a house, indeed a crystal, but one derived from our future freedom: a star, but one that will be a new Earth.
—Ernst Bloch
The Principle of Hope
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