Redtree Times

Comforter – At the West End Gallery

That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized. I now had further cause for serious reflection. Right up to the present I have never lost the feeling of contradiction that lies behind all knowledge. My life has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others, and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man’s life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.

–Hermann Hesse, Gertrude (1910)

It was one of those mornings when you wake up with an air of glumness around you. You know it’s going to rain all day, that there will be no sunshine to hold you up like a crutch. No light to wash out the stain of gray. In the early light of morning, the grayness seems even more stark, the rain giving everything out the window a graininess, like you were looking at an old photograph.

You sigh and it feels like the glum and the gray might infect everything for the day. Maybe longer. It makes you reflect and all you can pull up are other memories of this glumness and all the other difficult passages of life.

Hesse’s words begin to ring true, that life is difficult and miserable. A long and weary night.

You gird yourself for the coming day, knowing that it might be a constant struggle. One of those days where nothing goes the way you desire and everything feels like it’s turned to pure crap…

That’s how my morning began.

An absence of light.

I was ready to simply find a song to play for this week’s Sunday musical selection and get on with it. Face the day and do battle with it. But in doing so, the first song that caught my eye on the opening YouTube page was an old song from Tommy James and the Shondells. From 1968. Heard it a thousand times before and always liked it. Probably played it here before after it was used to great effect in a late episode of Breaking Bad.

So, I clicked on it. It was a video that had the lyrics so I read along. It felt like one of those flashes of light that Hesse mentioned above, with a sudden brightness that is comforting and wonderful. In that flash of light, the glumness receded and I felt that my spirit was lightened.

I am ready now for the day. Maybe even eager.

Such is the power of music, of art. And, man, am I thankful for that.

Here’s that song, Crystal Blue Persuasion.