Being an associate editor is kind of like little Mikey on the Life cereal commercials, always handed the stuff no one else wants because Hey, he likes it! He has to like it. He’s the littlest. It’s a bit annoying. There’s only so much you can take.
Actually, there’s only so much of most things you can take. I can’t really think of anything–okay, well, maybe one or two things–that don’t get tired by about the 4th or 5th round. And we’re supposedly creatures of habit and routine. So why do we all tend to resist doing the same thing over and over no matter what it is?
Well, some of us don’t. I’m listening to Rachmaninov. It’s the London recording of the Ampico recordings made in 1979, “Rachmaninov plays Rachmaninov.” (Who else should he play?) So it’s actually him performing his seriously unbelievable music (and some rearrangements of familiar pieces). Some future Jeopardy contestant is out there thinking, But Rachmaninov wasn’t alive in 1979. That’s true. He died in 1943. The Ampico was an original “player piano” presented in America in 1913. The recordings were made from one of these specially-adapted concert grands. All of this is in the liner notes for any inquisitive freakoes who actually care. But it’s incredible to think of the time and energy spent developing this system to keep original performances of this music “alive.” Obviously, it wasn’t made just for Rachmaninov, but I can understand that impulse to commit day after day to bettering one’s piano proficiency. But the technicians who assigned themselves to the tedium of developing a better system for recording and reproducing the music, working for so trivial and secondary a goal to the actual art being preserved, it seems less worthwhile a role to carve out for oneself in history. Yet they had to because it was there, much like climbing the mountain. And it’s a good thing they did, because we would have never heard Rachmaninov play his own music the way it was meant to be played. It truly is a glorious thing to hear.
What the heck this non sequitur silliness has to do with any of my earlier points is that these men dedicated their lifetimes of learning to this endeavor because it was there, it was possible, and it hadn’t been accomplished before. It strikes me that this has been going on for some time now, since the first caveman saw the first mountain and thought, I’d be willing to wager that of yet, none of my cohorts has ambitioned to scale that eminent massif. . . (Okay, it was probably more a series of impassioned grunts and club waving, but you get the idea.)
Want to know what I think? (You’re reading, aren’t you?) I think the entire human race is doomed because that old saying Mom was fond of saying about following your friend over the cliff just because he jumped is actually our inescapable human instinct. We can’t help but push the button on that nuclear warhead because it’s there to be pushed. It’s what so many authors and philosophers and musicians and artists throughout the ages have been saying: Not only can we not save ourselves, we will be our own ultimate demise. We won’t have to wait for Armageddon because if Jesus doesn’t come back and defeat Satan soon, we’ll beat Him to it. The button is waiting to be pushed, God, in case you didn’t notice. I don’t mean to be pushy here, but we keep climbing the mountains, advancing, and pushing the buttons, and pretty soon there won’t be any more to push. The longer we live, the further from fine we be.
And if that isn’t reason to be writing your ever-loving guts out, I just don’t know what is.
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