Beauty

Seniors, as you follow the way of the sheep from the Gospel of Matthew 25, and you continue to perform your works of mercy to assist those in crisis, do not forget to look for beauty in the "common, ordinary, unspectacular flow of everyday life."

David Oistrakh plays Claire de lune by Claude Debussy. Recorded in Paris, 1962, with Frida Bauer in piano.

[Both Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré composed musical composition based on Verlaine’s poetry, and Verlaine's poem inspired Claude Debussy to write his own ‘Clair de lune’, the third movement of his Suite bergamasque]

Clair de lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Moonlight

Your soul is a select landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers* go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.

Paul Verlaine, 1869

[*bergamaskers--country dancers from the area of Bergamo in Northern Italy]