I'm into my second week of feeling like I haven't in ages and much of it has to do with the music I've been listening to and some of it with the absence of certain stressors. I'm trying to hold on to these feelings for as long as possible because soon some of those issues return. 

Inner peace seems more attainable when you accept what you cannot change and realize the things you want or the people you like who do not feel the same are what you need to let go of once and for all.

It's no wonder insomnia is so prevalent among those of us who tend to worry a lot. Other people, family, bills and, most fearsome of all, the future can all combine into a huge snowball of worry that seems to wreck your soul.

Insomnia, after a while, becomes something so common a part of your life you either sink or swim with it. I've been swimming most of the time, lately, mostly because pills, meditation and exercise (earlier in the day, of course) just don't seem to work. So I get up to clean or watch an old movie or sitcom or I pick up something light like the book below, which I read in one sitting.

I enjoyed Departure From The Script a lot; even if it's on the predictable side, it's the good kind of dependable, where you know you're going to get a solid romantic read. The characters (both main and secondary) are extremely likable and fully fleshed out and Jae, as always, writes well.

I'd strongly recommend this for a cozy afternoon, especially if you need to escape from real life for a few hours. Cute, sweet and full of refreshing sincerity, Departure is a stand-out in its genre.

 I'm not crazy about insomnia (who is?) but I do like to think of not sleeping as a chance to read as much as possible. There's no way I'd have taken in as many novels as I have without it...which is a good thing, I suppose, since this terrific new book has me jotting down even more titles for my Kindle and nightstand:

 

Here's another title I found in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Combining "the didactic and the euphoric" (writes literary editor Daniel Soar), The Fruits Of The Earth mixes prose and poetry. It's really quite beautiful, full of passages that can truly speak to the heart.



"Let your waiting be not even longing, but simply a welcoming. Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else. Long only for what you have."

"Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon."

On rare days when pop or rock is just too much for me, I turn to the quieter, but no less magnetic, side of music. This album has been on my cd player all day and has helped me find amazing amounts of peace. It's also a truly lovely listen.


All Music  has a solid review for it here:

Review by James Manheim  [-]

Originally recorded in 1988, this was one of the recordings that made historical performance practice the mainstream when it came to Bach's major choral works. Every moment of the mass was thought through anew, every bit of conventional piety purged. Major B minor mass recordings in the following years have developed one aspect or another further than conductor Philippe Herreweghe does here; Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan chisels out the counterpoint in greater detail, and for grand reverential warmth there's always John Eliot Gardiner. But for a constant sense of wonder that makes even the larger harmonic structure of the mass seem surprising as it unfolds -- for a real sense of a group responding not only to a conductor's control but to his artistic vision -- this reading by Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale Ghent remains unexcelled. Herreweghe returned to the Mass in B minor in 2000; that later recording features soloists who are sublime (Véronique Gens, Andreas Scholl) rather than merely good, but it does not exceed the marvelous freshness of this release, which is holding up well close to a quarter century later. At a budget price, this can't be beat. The recording was also a milestone in its engineering technique; the choir and soloists sound natural and clear in the Ghent church where they were recorded. Basic booklet notes are provided in English, German, and French.

She was sometimes called "Cyclone Callas" because of her temperament. Even before I ever heard any of her recordings I had heard this. I've always been a bit fascinated by people with passionate personalities and super-amazing talent, as if the two forces are impossible to separate.

 

Arianna Huffington wrote a solid, fascinating biography on Maria Callas in the early 1980s, parts of which can be read here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=k7rhGRvxyWwC&pg=PA93&dq=maria+callas+personality&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EzbLU9SiBc-TyAS_44DQBw&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=maria%20callas%20personality&f=false


And of equal interest, if not more since it comes straight from the source herself, is this article from a 1950s issue of Life magazine:

Life article
http://books.google.com/books?id=W0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA118&dq=maria+callas+temperamental+life&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uTvLU_7XLM22yAS21YGIBw&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=maria%20callas%20temperamental%20life&f=false

 

So bleak and disparaging of love (especially physical love) and marriage ever existing in the same space, The Kreutzer Concerto is best read only if you're in a strong enough mood to handle its darkness...or if you're already in agreement with main character Pozdnyshev. Either way, the short novel is gripping and overwhelming (not necessarily in a good way)...and best followed with something happy.

 I prefer the views of a woman who appears briefly in the opening scene where a small group of people are discussing their takes on women, men, love and marriage. The lone female says:

"Ah, but what you say is terrible...there certainly exists among human beings this feeling which is called loved, and which lasts, not for months and years, but life."

On the other hand, there is almost an appealing frankness to Tolstoy's that society was better off when marriages were arranged and none of "what is this?...The young girls are seated, and gentlemen walk up and down before them, as in a bazaar, and make their choice." Leo Tolstoy seems honestly conflicted between how things should be and how they are, what is natural and what is not.

Much of what he writes in The Kreutzer Sonata is not friendly to women or romantic love, but he's being true to his own views, good ones or bad. In Epilogue To The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1890, Tolstoy shared see what he saw as the novella's central theme:

"Let us stop believing that carnal love is high and noble and understand that any end worth our pursuit -- in service of humanity, our homeland, science, art, let alone God -- any end, so long as we may count it worth our pursuit, is not attained by joining ourselves to the objects of our carnal love in marriage or outside it; that, in fact, infatuation and conjunction with the object of our carnal love (whatever the authors of romances and love poems claim to the contrary) will never help our worthwhile pursuits but only hinder them."