Well, hello! For today's entry I'm going to break out of my normal routine, thus: I am going to use the least possible amount of my own imagination, and simply copy, word for word, out of a book. However, the arduous typing involved will almost more than make up for the absence of imagination; it'll be no less entertaining for you lot, though.
This I very well know, that while I am asleep, I feel neither hope nor despair; I am free from pain and insensible of glory. Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man even. There is only one thing, which somebody once put into my head, that I dislike in sleep; it is, that it resembles death; there is very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep.
Sancho Panηa (Chapter LXVIII of Don Quixote)
Wise words from the honest squire. I finally got to the end of Don Quixote on Saturday, and was on the very verge of tears in the final stages. But it wasn't to be: the floodgates of my emotions were firmly held back. However, I didn't have much longer to wait for my ducts to open themselves and release the flood after such a long drought, for The Pianist was on the television in the evening of that day. After an uncomfortably long time without being moved to tears, I finally cried during the film, while the bedraggled Wladyslaw Szpilman - after (I presume) living for months without playing a piano - played Chopin's Ballade in G Minor for the German soldier. The sight of that poor, starving tramp, playing such beautiful music so beautifully, was too moving. Just the idea of such a musician being persecuted and forced to live in such a way for such a ridiculous reason (not that any reason could be justified, for anybody) as being Jewish, encapsulated how unfair the world can (and for the most part, is) - how unfair it can be.
So much for my promise at the start of this entry. More plagiarism to come!
