Sunday solace...

I had dinner with a close friend last night and we had a good time. She is one of the nicest, sweetest people I know and I always feel better after I'm around her. We also work together and over the past few years I've come to think of her as my sister. I honestly do not know what I would do without her.

Today I'm just listening to classical music and reading newspapers. I found this album through a review in last week's Sunday Times. When I'm a bit down or restless I listen to classical music more than any other genre. It helps a lot.

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/w/1190/Franz-Peter-Schubert-Piano-Sonata-No-18-in-G-major-D894 :

David Fray returns to Schubert with his much-anticipated second recording of the composer’s piano music, a collection of passionate late works. Along with the Sonata in G D894 ‘Fantasie’ and the Hungarian Melody D817, Fray presents two duets for piano four-hands, both composed in the last year of Schubert’s life: the Fantasia in F minor D940 and the towering Allegro in A minor D947, ‘Lebensstürme’ (‘Storms of Life’). Fray invited Jacques Rouvier, his mentor and renowned teacher from the Paris Conservatoire, to join him in the studio, making this album a true labour of love.

“Few pianists have been more acutely sensitive to Schubert's complex inner world” Gramophone

The young French pianist’s Schubert interpretations are universally admired, both on disc and in recital. In its review of Fray’s 2009 album of the Moments musicaux and Impromptus D899, The Guardian praised his “discerning musicality… the sheer lucidity and polish of Fray’s playing, its exceptional command of colour and touch and the way he invariably uses that range of sound to point up musical structures in a meaningful way.” Gramophone declared it “a Schubert disc of the rarest distinction”, while BBC Music Magazine joined the fray with: “What’s immediately striking about his Schubert playing is its refinement, and variety of colour.”

Although Schubert composed over 20 sonatas, only three were published during his lifetime, of which the ‘Fantasie’ G Major Sonata D894, published in 1826, was the last. After Schubert’s death, Robert Schumann described this masterpiece as the "most perfect in form and conception" of all Schubert's sonatas.

Schubert spent the summers of 1818 and 1824 at the chateau of Count Johann Karl Esterházy (of the same Hungarian noble family that had been patron to Haydn), where he taught the Count’s two daughters. There he was exposed to the lively Magyar rhythms and tunes that infuse the Ungarische Melodie D817, a gem he composed in 1824 on his return to Vienna, but which went unpublished until a century after his death.

One of Schubert’s favourite forms of chamber music was the piano duet – he composed some 60 works in the genre. The Fantasia in F minor of 1828 is his last and most poetic contribution to the form as well as one of the most important works in his oeuvre.

In addition to David Fray, Jacques Rouvier – Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire since 1979 – counts some of today’s most illustrious international virtuosos among his former students, including Arcadi Volodos and Hélène Grimaud.--from Presto Classical

 

 

 

"All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!" ~Thomas Carlyle

 

 

I have this intense need to be punished. Not in a 50 Shades of Grey kind of way (not that at all!) but in an honest, old-fashioned, punishment for punishment's sake kind of way. I can never quite shake the feeling that I am a bad person...and even when my mind is somewhat at rest the feeling that I'm bad is still there. 

It never really leaves me, even when I feel I'm being as normal and as good as possible. I don't know if it has to do with me being gay or the fact that I feel like I wouldn't still be single if I were a better person. I don't know if being alone a lot feeds it, but I imagine it does.

It goes without saying that a person can make herself completely sick over worrying about things like this (or any thing, really) and it's even worse when you can't shake yourself...because you are always with you and you can't run away from yourself, not even mentally.

There's this quote from the novel Happy Now? that speaks to that:

 

 "I mean, don't you ever get sick of yourself?" he asked Claire. "Doesn't it sometimes seem ridiculous that we have to live our entire lives in one consciousness, and there's no escape? Even when we dream, we dream about ourselves. Doesn't that just seem outrageous?"

Though the Bible is more spiritual for most people, and I certainly understand why, I read St. Augustine more often. 

Many nights, I find I really need him. There is something about his writing that helps soothe me to the point that I don't feel ready to scream inside my own skin. I find the idea of living with the bare minimum, almost like a monk or nun, truly appealing.

The following won't necessarily help me get rid of the conviction that I am not a good person, but I do think it will help me live better and in St. Augustine's Confessions I find serenity I can't find elsewhere.

 http://zenhabits.net/12-essential-rules-to-live-more-like-a-zen-monk/

St. Augustine's Confessions (or The Confessions of St. Augustine) is also worth looking at:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf.htm

I usually have insomnia because I physically cannot fall asleep, like there's a switch that won't turn off deep inside my brain. But this week it's been because I'm afraid to fall asleep, afraid to fall into my dreams, the ones where the person I like likes me back.

I can't explain exactly why I feel guilty when I wake up from them...I've tried everything I can think of (including lucid dreaming) to not have them...so (I don't think) it's not like I can control them. Perhaps the guilt comes from actually believing (within the dream itself and only during the dreaming) that the things that are happening are true.

I'm still searching for more information on guilt and dreams, but I haven't found what I'm looking for...though this (mostly unrelated) article helped in another way. I love the thought catalog website; they often have amazing articles.

After surviving that kind of ache, you’ll be so much stronger, so much more certain of yourself. You’ll see that all pain (physical, emotional, and metal) is a temporary state of being, not a permanent one. There is always a reason to go on, always a reason to fight for yourself.

Read the rest here:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/wes-janisen/2013/08/you-should-fall-for-someone-who-doesnt-love-you/

Until I can figure out how to stop having those dreams I will try and enjoy the other good dreams I occasionally have and take pleasure in the relief I get when I wake from bad dreams and realize they are not true anymore.

Some helpful quotes about feelings...

I have been kind of beating myself up about feelings and how most everyone else I know seems to handle theirs so much better. I put my brownies away (because I refuse to eat when I'm like this and only want to eat when I'm genuinely hungry) and then found some great quotes that help somewhat.

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
― Oscar Wilde

Well ^^this^^ makes me feel a little bit better about not being able to write good poetry.

And this goes a little way to realizing you can't always extinguish them:

“...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

Absolutely to this:

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

And definitely this:

“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”
― George Eliot

Alone with brownies and good books on a snow day...both a good thing and a bad, but mostly good. I am so happy I found these two books when I did the little cleaning I did today. There are both amazing and I thought I had lost them! Re-discovery is fun and perfect for this kind of day indoors.

The Music Of Your Life opens with a description that makes me think of my childhood and watching "The Lawrence Welk Show" with my grandparents, plus it's just a super collection of stories.

Giant's Bread I bought and read (and read and read) in the tenth grade. I'll never forgot how I felt the first time I read it. I couldn't believe Agatha Christie had written it nor how beautiful it could be in some parts. I read it so much the binding is barely holding together.