365 Days of Song Recommendations: Dec 31
This is the 3rd in a 3-post series featuring all 3 writers from the #365Songs project. For this concluding song recommendation, we have each written an essay about the same piece of music.
“Ode to Joy” — Ludwig van Beethoven
We live in darkness, a constant state of trauma. We’ve been through a lot these past five years — an orange-faced monster, mass shootings and racially-motivated murders, wildfires and melting glaciers, the perpetual threat of a pandemic virus. It feels at times impossible to get out of bed in the morning, much less put on a face of false cheer for that endless sea of Zoom calls.
From experience, I nod to the wisdom that grief is more pressing, more suffocating in year two than in year one. And that was true for 2021, the second masked spin around the sun. Coming to terms with the loss of how things used to be while finding light for what’s to come is a lot to handle. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been cloaked in a constant state of malaise.
This was a year when we all seemingly quit our jobs, moved, said fuck off to something or someone. All the while, the institutions around us continued to demand more and more from us, asking us to live in a make-believe world where everything was just fine. Some of us complied, some of us didn’t. But we all struggled.
And yet, how privileged we are to feel any loss at all. To feel loss is to remind us that we had a lot to lose, and that’s just not true for everyone around the world. So much of what we’ve lost was never accessible to so many. It’s easy to lose that perspective from the confined comforts of our heated homes, from behind the windows where we dream of travel and concerts and meals with friends.
When I consider — really think about — the places I’ve been, it’s clear that the most optimistic amongst us often possess the least. Optimism is unachievable when you have everything and expect more; but it serves small glimmers of hope when you’re grateful for what little you already have.
It may feel like we’ve lost so much, and we have, that we’ll never again live the way we once did, and we may very well not. But maybe that’s ok, maybe a sobering dose of reality is exactly what we need.
Remember in those early months of the pandemic when villages would sing out their windows together, when photos of wildlife living their best post-human lives went viral every day, when we actually believed that perhaps humanity was correcting itself? That’s optimism in the face of darkness. That’s what happens before you have too much time to think about what you’ve already lost.
Am I optimistic for 2022? No, but I know there will be countless joys along the way. That some version of a new normality will present itself, that we’ll learn to thrive in the darkness. When we’re finally ok being humbled by our new reality, we’ll make magic again.
And that brings me to Schiller’s Ode to Joy, and to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — his last, and during the period when he couldn’t hear his own music. In sonic darkness, Beethoven created one of the most optimistic pieces of music ever written. A protest song, a rallying cry, an oath to rise and face whatever darkness hides the light.
What better moment to revisit this music? If he can do it, why can’t we? If not now, when?
The complete #365Songs playlist is here:
