Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…
Monasteries are very quiet places indeed. Garrulous as I am beyond the normal Irish capacity for such things, I am not someone obviously identifiable as a great lover of silence. At the Community of the Resurrection, even here in the heart of West Yorkshire’s network of densely populated post-industrial valleys, the daytime silence between the offices can be intense. The stillness is broken only by the occasional fall of well-shod feet along the corridor or the distant call of an ambulance siren carried on the breeze.
My mind fills often fills the void with sounds of its own imagining. Often these are pieces of classical music which I have loved but not listened to for a few years – the pounding drum and sinister, relentlessly advancing, cellos of the opening of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem or the bizarre intermingling of funeral march and chaotically joyful klezmer band that is the feierlich und gemessen movement of Mahler’s First Symphony.
Jewish klezmer bands were a familiar feature of the Bohemia of Mahler’s youth. In the week after Holocaust Memorial Day, there is no need for explanation why they are no longer a feature of life in the 21st Century Czech Republic.