One of my Haverford College roomates lived in NYC. He and another roomate introduced me to renaissance clasical music. One of our greatest moments was going to midnight mass on Chritsmas eve at one of the huge cathedrals in NYC. I believe we did both St Patrick's and St Thomas. I believe one year it was B Minor Mass (Bach) which used to be one of my all time favorite pieces of music. The night we went to B Minor, I recall driving into NYC on Jersey highways in that same 1948 Plymouth, with B Minor loud on the radio on WQXR. I had this overwhelming vision of the perfect death....an accident in the car, the car ending up upside down, the wheels still turning, me expired, but B Minor still blasting on the radio.
I noticed when I was young that lots of grown up books dealth with what I considered an obsession with mortality. Of course as a teenager, that issue wasn't on the agenda for me. I had a few years in the early 7th decade (I'm now 65) where onset of mortality bothered me a bit. Now I'm conforted by the fact that there is no sense of loss. If I'm dead, I'm not here to experience it. Period, end of problem. I hope this isn't too morbid for my kids to read....I find it comforting. Recall the death rate is always, ultimately 100%.
Speaking of mature books read young, Alex Kapnicky (sic) my freshman English teacher got on me for reading James Joyce Portrait of an Artist for a book report. He complained that I was both too young and not Catholic so I couldn't understand the book. It got so bad, my father had to come in to defend my right to read the book. Kapnicky probably had something going for him. But I really loved reading the book back then. So what if I missed 30%!
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