Aubade, by Philip Larkin

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

The Flower Duet, from the opera Lakme

From Wikipedia:

The Flower Duet (Sous le dôme épais) is a famous duet for sopranos from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé, first performed in Paris in 1883. The duet takes place in Act 1 of the three act opera, between characters Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika, as they go to gather flowers by a river.^[1] Its ubiquitous presence in movies and popular music since the mid-1980s was inaugurated by its usage in the 1983 horror film The Hunger.

For more of Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca in this 2007 performance at Baden-Baden , check out The Opera Gala: Live from Baden-Baden

How Heavy Metal Is Keeping Us Sane

How Heavy Metal Is Keeping Us Sane

Dark and disturbing, the music is honest about human nature
By James Parker

To see a world without heavy metal, an unmetalled world, simply rotate your cranium a few degrees to the right or left. Perhaps you are in Starbucks, where it is time for your Iced Caramel Macchiato. Not a single unnameable beast assaults you as you make your way to the counter. Rounding the display of merchandise, you are neither hexed by depression nor dragged to hell in the arms of a she-demon. You place your order, quite failing to bellow with psychic agony. There is no heavy metal anywhere.

Or is there? For as you wait, drink in hand, at the condiment bar, in the usual muttering press of sugar-grabbers and milk-seekers, you feel a tremendous agitation. You feel, in fact, fleetingly homicidal. Who are these people? Why are they taking so long? If only you could smite them all …

“We seem to move on a thin crust,” warned Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough,

which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.

Though written in 1922, this is metalspeak, pure and simple. The venerable mythographer was presaging not only the basso quakes and pyro-blasts that have long been a staple of the larger metal shows, but the metal mind-set itself. Since its invention (to which we will return in a moment), heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory. The sleeper parched of his dreams, or purged of his nightmares, goes swiftly bonkers: without fantasy there is no reality. It might be argued—indeed, it will be argued, by me, right now—that heavy metal has kept us sane.

For the rest of the article, click here.