Ode to Music, Golden Days, Gospel Wisdom
Three Point Thursday
Happy Three Point Thursday!
This week’s edition features my perspective on music, a call to be right here, right now, and one of my favorite lines from the Bible.
An ode to music.
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been shocked with chills from great music. The electric kind that send a lightning strike down your spine as the hair on your arms stands up. It’s the best. You know, it has been said that music is the language everybody speaks. This is both beautiful and true. There is no place, no culture, and no people who don’t make it and enjoy it. Songs are so magical in the way they slip past your rational mind and deep into your emotional mind. You probably enjoy songs in other languages when you don’t even known what they’re saying. Amazing when you think about it.
The golden days are always now.
In high school, people would romanticize the football and basketball teams of earlier eras, when everyone’s athletic role models and older brothers played. Our teams were often just as skilled, and the competition just as intense, but somehow, it was more special back in those days. Let’s call it the Midnight in Paris Hoax:1 the tendency of the mind to over-romanticize past eras. Combine it with what I call the ride-off-into-the-sunset fallacy—the delusion that one day you’ll arrive at a state of permanent happiness—and you have a reliable recipe for misery. You can’t help but think of the vintage Schopenhauer quote:
“...though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.”
Or how about these lines from Emerson:
“…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
You know who could’ve used this wisdom from Emerson? The character Andy Bernard from The Office. In one of the last scenes of the show, he says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” I wish I could tell Andy that there is. You just need awareness that the Midnight in Paris mentality is a hoax. You just need to realize that the golden days are always now.
Matthew 7:7.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
The movie Midnight in Paris tells the story of Gil Pender, a writer living in California. Gil writes movie scripts, but dreams of writing a novel. While he is on vacation with his wife in France, it is all he can think about, especially because during the 1920s Paris was a hotspot for fiction writers, including the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. These two and other artists—like Picasso and Dalí—contributed to what became known as The Jazz Age, or The Roaring Twenties.
One night, Gil is wandering around the streets and miraculously travels back in time to the very age he had been romanticizing. He ends up meeting Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and is as shocked as Luke Skywalker finding out who his father is. But his panic then transforms into joy; he realizes he is living in the times he always thought were the best of times.
But then he meets a woman named Adriana. She surprises Gil by saying that she doesn’t think they are in a golden age. No, in her mind, the real golden age was the Belle Époque, an earlier period in French history. That was the era when people were wiser, the artists more talented, the city more glorious.
One night, Adriana and Gil are wandering around and manage to travel back in time to the very age she had been romanticizing. She meets some of her heroes of the Belle Époque, and is as elated as someone feeling the effects of red wine for the first time.
But then they get deeper into their conversation. Adriana's heroes do not think they are in a golden age. No, in their minds, the real golden age was the Renaissance. That was the era when people were wiser, the artists more talented, the city more glorious.
You see the trend.