Friday Feelings — 4th Edition — Cracks

On Monday, we will have lived in our home for 5 years. That will be the longest that I have ever lived anywhere, and I suspect the same for Emma. When we moved in, the house (built in 1889) had been renovated following a purchase at auction by a gentleman who does this a lot. (I will not comment here on my feelings about housing and property ownership, but, reader, I have them.)

When we moved in, everything was fresh and new. The garden immaculate, if sparse. The paint aromatic. The carpet soft and unblemished. Five years on, this is no longer the case.

Cracks appeared. First in the plaster and paint. Then in the stone wall. Pressure, time, and the elements all doing what they do best: persisting. Outlasting and wearing on everything. Everyone. The thing about cracks is that — left unmended — they grow. Creeping, spidering, they colonise whatever is within their reach, frequently at a pace that obscures their sundering march.

If there’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in, then why the hell does it feel so dark? The cracks in the house. The faults in a family. The rift in the res publica. Pressure. Stress. Destabilisation of established orders, whether they be established within our body, intellectual framework, or broader society.

These five years…and I can feel the cracks.

The phase of my life when the cracks began to appear wraps roughly around the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. The recurring dreams of unpreparedness, nakedness, and subconscious anxiety still haunt those halls rather than any others. That being the case, I thought that I’d share some of the music that found me then.

There’s obviously much more, and these aren’t necessarily my favourite or the most significant. But they’re the ones that came to mind, and I think they communicate something about me and that time.

• The Chairman Dances — by John Adams
• String Quartet №3 — by George Rochberg
• Out There (from The Hunchback of Notre Dame) — by Alan Menken
• The Book of Love — The Magnetic Fields
• Just One of Those Things — by Cole Porter, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald

Have an amazing weekend. I’ll be playing with my not-band today and my yes-band tomorrow. Hope you have things to make you happy.