A White Night and the West Wind

I've been up since yesterday, and have watched TV (news, Tatort, CSI and Bones), practiced the piano (bits of Bach's Partita No. 4 and of the Moonlight Sonata), drafted an email to Papa (who is currently abroad) which I ended up not sending after all, caught up on the Guardian and New York Times and Globe and Mail as well as assorted blogs (Gawker, Jezebel, Chocolate&Zucchini, Je Mange La Ville, The Sartorialist, and A Don's Life), read a late 19th-century novel (The Award of Justice, set in a mining town at the Rocky Mountains, by A. Maynard Barbour) on Project Gutenberg, and finally worked again on a Lighthouse blog post about one of Shelley's poems. Lastly I took a shower which put a period to my previous piglet-like state of happy dirtiness. (c:

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Since then Mama's friend M. has come for a visit and the two of them are chatting away in the corner room. In honour of the occasion Mama prepared an elaborate breakfast from which I have already profited. It specifically consists of croissants, buns, brie and camembert (or two bries, or two camemberts, for all I know), cucumber slices and tomato wedges, gouda, ham-like meat, jams, honey, eggs boiled in the shell, coffee, and tea as well as a munificent platter of Christmas delicacies: Spekulatius, Pfeffernüsse, Printen, Dominosteine, Marzipankartoffeln, and gold coins which hopefully contain chocolate and not the intriguing brown toffee-ish substance which is its occasional alternative. Where the platter is concerned I have only had a Marzipankartoffel and a fragment of Spekulatius for fear of depriving my school- and university-beleaguered siblings; aside from the ethics of the matter, and the natural impulses of sisterly sympathy, it isn't wise to make them cranky.

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The Shelley post has sucked up hours and hours in work, also because I went in knowing little about the poet aside from a general impression gathered from his most famous poems, and therefore found out a lot of interesting and necessary pieces of information and ideas only during the process of writing the blog post. Though I was repeatedly tempted to say that it's done and just post it, I didn't until just now because of the niggling feeling that it's only a tiny bit short of complete.

Now and then I have wondered whether to "illustrate" one of the Lighthouse posts with music; in this case it took a while to decide not to embed a YouTube video of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor. The thing is that the concerto really feels suited to the poem; it is rebellious and unconventional but also lyrical and mostly optimistic, it reminds me (as I wrote in a previous blog post) of a tempest and therefore of wind, it has impassioned passages interspersed with tranquil lulls, and it likewise ends on a peculiarly ambiguous (fulfilling/unfulfilling) note. As for the time frame, Mozart composed the concerto in 1785 whereas "Ode to the West Wind" was written in 1819 and published in 1820.

Another artistic work that came to mind in connection with the poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. I decided to keep that out of the blog post, too, but initially I wrote:

If Shelley had grown older, disillusioned, and resigned, or if he had lived in a different political climate and period, perhaps he might have written something closer to what feels to me like the "Ode"'s thematic twin but emotional antithesis: Shakespeare's sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year thou may'st in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," etc.

As it turns out the one significant cultural cross-reference I kept in the post was a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, as a literal illustration. I am not a great fan of that artist and this particular painting is perilously close to kitsch. (I also suspect that whoever uploaded this image to Wikipedia photoshopped it to heighten that unfortunate effect, but at least the details are easier to make out here especially given the reduced picture size than in the other, nobler and darker image.) On the other hand it comes from the same period and atmospherically depicts an apposite scene.

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In any case I seem to have reached the point of sleep deprivation in which my brain is on autopilot, but I'll practice the piano. Then, as soon as someone besides Gi. is at home, common sense will presumably propel me to the bank to take care of an urgent point of business. (A propos of the latter, and because a picture is worth a thousand words: )c:<<< )