Shivering again

Hearing music by Fauré on the radio I’m irresistibly and
painfully reminded of the time when I sat in a cold
Invercargill church on a Sunday afternoon many years ago
and listened to a live performance of Fauré’s Requiem
while in a state of what can only be described as sin. The
music, so sacred, so holy, went through me like a knife. It
spoke of a state of moral being from which I had all too
grossly fallen. Oh, and I was shivering again. Music rebukes
us like that, cuts into the gut, tears up time and shreds it in
your face. I remember once a few years ago, out of the blue,
hearing a song I’d completely and utterly forgotten from my
youth, ‘Safe in My Garden’ by the Mamas and the Papas, and
bursting into tears, because it took me straight back to 1968
and the absurd agony of being young and alive and romantic
in that year. It still moves me, that extraordinarily prescient
song by John Phillips that signalled, even in its own time,
the necessary death of youthful idealism. Only, I didn’t see
it then. He did.