Gift
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"George Perle, a composer, author, theorist and teacher who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986 and was widely considered the poetic voice of atonal composition, died on Friday [Jan. 23, 2009] at his home in Manhattan. He was 93."
— The New York Times this morning
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From this journal on June 15, 2004:
Kierkegaard on death:
"I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death. Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death."
— Works of Love,
Harper Torchbooks,
1964, p. 324
For more on "the thought of the eternal," see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.
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