the wonder fairy comes calling

Today and yesterday seem to have been times to reconnect or soar with wonder.

On the one hand, there were the first 20-odd pages of a novel I gather was popular when it came out in 2005 called "The Book Thief." I am slow in getting around to things and slower still to open a book, but I needed something to send me to sleep, so I opened it and began to read. I could feel myself balking at the time frame and tableau -- World War II and the Holocaust -- but the narrator's voice led me in, brought me along, and entranced me. The voice telling the tale was the voice of Death.

And yet, having read 20 pages, I went back and reread them. Yes, it was the voice of Death -- a ballsy artistic choice -- and yet I was not quite sure. Couldn't this voice as easily be the voice of Life? My answer was "mostly, yes" and there was a wonderful jolt that that recognition or imagining should be so easy and smooth and fairy-tale-esque without being a fairy tale. Death speaks. Life speaks. No point in falling for the old juxtaposition of "life and death," a false, if popular, duet. Just how plumb wonderful that the one might stand for the other or the other for the one. Not two.

And then today, somehow I got roped into listening to Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto," a marvel among marvels that made me wonder if the creator of so much of what I called beauty would have been aware of the tsunami he had unleashed ... for me and perhaps for others. JEEEEE-SUS!!!!!!