"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

#Spooktober 30 – Grieve no More

I really liked season 1 of Carnival Row, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevigne, and this is the music that plays in the end credits. The artist calls herself Patty Gurdy and plays the hurdy-gurdy, a weird hand-crank string instrument with a keyboard that sounds a bit like a cornemuse and is typical of Galician folk music, and she also composed the lullaby that plays such a central part in the weird, fantasy-gothic investigative story of the tv series.

This song is no less intimate, and is sung by a mother to her child or by a lover to their sleeping darling. It tells of resistance and loss, displacement and exile, all themes of this incredibly powerful series.

Now rest you there, in spite of the storm that is raging
Faith goes and comes, as long as the seasons are changing
I am sure there is a safe valley for you and for me
Where we would fly, in joy we’d cry
For our blessed land
For what we strive, would come alive
And you would grieve no more

Summertime

Clarice Lispector’s Room you never designed for yourself

The premise of The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel from 1964 is almost nothing: a sculptor, known to us only by her initials, decides to clean out the maid’s room after the maid has left her employment. That’s the entire plot. She

Read More »
books and literature

Isaac Asimov’s Living Space and Other Stories

By the life of me, I will never understand how these are collected.The book contains some delightful short stories plus a slightly longer one (Profession), mostly all of them revolving around the rise of Multivac, the first supercomputer built by humanity which in turn takes

Read More »
Summertime

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Architect

Same poet, different book. Rilke, the Bohemian poet and playwright, already made an appearance in the original list, so I’m well aware that bringing him back on day two of a sequel about not repeating myself is a strange way to start. But the Duino

Read More »
Share on LinkedIn
Throw on Reddit
Roll on Tumblr
Mail it
No Comments

Post A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RELATED POSTS

Isaac Asimov’s Living Space and Other Stories

By the life of me, I will never understand how these are collected.The book contains some delightful short stories plus a slightly longer one (Profession), mostly all of them revolving around the rise of Multivac, the first supercomputer built by humanity which in turn takes

Read More

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Architect

Same poet, different book. Rilke, the Bohemian poet and playwright, already made an appearance in the original list, so I’m well aware that bringing him back on day two of a sequel about not repeating myself is a strange way to start. But the Duino

Read More