| Chen 的个人资料The Wind from Salzburg照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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5月31日 June is Coming!June is coming!
My favorite month--
Despite the wet and hot weather,
despite the threatening approach of the sophocating summer,
despite the sinister presence of the end-of-term examination,
despite the agony of saying good-bye to beloved classmates for two solid months,
despite the fact that I would be a year older after the 14th,
June is still my favorite month!
And for the First Day of June--
A very happy Children's Day to everyone.
Be you young or old,
Always be a child at heart.
 5月25日 Something in Chinese For a Change! First, I finnished reading this book on my flight back to China.
A highly entertaining book with a dash of history in it. Recommended.
 The lesson I got? Whatever you do, never attempt to marry a king. Or better still, never attempt to marry into the aristocracy! For the result usually is you would have an utterly miserable life, and end up having your head cut off!
Still want to keep this thing here for another day or two.
Forgive my vanity...
 I really haven't yet had time to write down my adventures in London. But I promise I will do this and will post it here the minute it is finished.
I am posting some of the picture I took in England here first so that you might have an idea of my journey.
Because I went there all by myself, I myself am seldom in the picture. But I guarantee that these photos are 100% genuine. They were not downloaded from the Internet :) I shot them myself.
I remember once upon a time long long ago I said that I would write something in Chinese here now and then. After all, I am Chinese. And after the trip to London, I am prouder of my country, my culture, and my language than ever!
When I got back from English, Tsong asked me to answer these questions. I did answer them and posted somewhere else. I am actually quite proud of the answers I gave. They are true to my heart but extremely funny(at least I think so...) at the same time.
But like my entry's usual fate, no one except Tsong offered me encouraging comments.
I am posting them here. I have no hope of getting any comments. I just want you to have fun, and maybe, laugh a little.
That's all I desire.
好！我做！
NO.1~~~
1.喜欢什么样的风景?
没有人的~ 2 你是如何评价你自己的？
蛮不错的嘛。 3.近期过得可好呀？
好极好极！ 4.被点名的感受？
没感觉。做就做呗。 5.我到底和你什么关系?
同学+朋友+室友+一起饕餮的人 6.到目前为止有没有一个除了恋人之外知心的异性好朋友?
不晓得。异性好友有的，知不知心就不知道了~这么回答貌似就是没有噢。(啊呀上当了，按这题的前提我不用答才是的！） 7.觉得你现在的专业适合你么？
没法更适合了！ NO.2 1.如果让你用生命换一个愿望，你会许什么？
让我再许三个愿望。 2.你已经和你最爱的人在一起了吗 ? 并且相信会一直走下去吗？
那当然是咯。我爹我妈不会和我这么好的女儿解除父女母女关系的。 3.如果让你选择一种水果来形容我，你会选择什么呢？
西瓜~甜甜的，凉凉的，水水的，舒心的~ 4.你如何看待"原罪"?
这玩意儿它是存在的。 5.黛玉和宝钗你更欣赏谁？
黛玉黛玉！宝钗，哼~ 6.你觉得现在什么对你是最重要的？
爹娘。 7.我的问题是：你上厕所没带纸，兜里只有一百块钱和一张男（女）友照片，你使用哪张？
这问题，忒恶心了吧。欺负我有不起钱也有不起男朋友是吧。 8.如果还有来生，你想生活在哪个国家？
做把奥地利小提琴不错哟。 9.家庭和事业你会更看中哪个？
看重和我有血缘关系的那个家庭。如果会有后组成的那个，绝对要让位事业！我是冷血动物！ 10你有没有过自杀的念头？为什么？
没有，怕死。 11 你觉得多长的人生历程最理想？你希望自己能活多少岁？理由
能活多久就活多久。活成千年老妖最好。 12.你喜欢什么类型的男友（女友）？
符合我那七条as…as…的。
哼，写了不怕你们揍我！ As handsome as Karlheinz Bohm As rich as Mr. Darcy As devoted and faithful as Major Dobbin/Mr. Thornton As talented as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart As persuasive and humorous as my own Papa As knowledgable as an encyclopaedia With a voice as heavenly as that of Fritz Wunderlich~ 其实我直接说我不准备找boyfriend算了。。。 13.你最后悔的事是什么？
被老天爷安排成女的了。 14.你的人生规划是什么？如果为了这个规划你需要放弃原则甚至人格，你会坚持么？
我从来不规划的。走到哪儿算哪儿。 15.你会为了别人的意愿而改变自己么?即使这个人对你很重要...
老爸老妈有这个power的。 16.如果真的要你选择很为难的事,你会...
弃权。 17.如果让你每天坚持做一件事(除了学习,吃饭,睡觉,上厕所,上网)你会做什么?为什么?
和爹娘聊天啊~Best part of the day! 18.如果你心情不好的时候会干什么呢？
那要看了。 要是想心情变好会听Dearest Mozart~ 要是想心情变得更差那就听Beethoven,要么做数学。。。。 19。在大学最大的收获是什么嘞？
被重视了。 20。讲个冷笑话来听听。。。
哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈，好笑吧。 21。你怎么定义你自己？
我是小鬼！
22。来大学后，第一和你主动搭讪的是哪个呀~？hoho~
昊哥！嫉妒吧。（注：昊哥乃06届外语系辅导员也~） 23．觉得什么时候爱上人会对你的人生规划没有影响？
当人生没有规划的时候。 24.在没有任何承诺的情况下,你会不会为一个人等一生?
切，没听说过Women are fickle，或是Men is a giddy thing的吗？ 25.写一首能体现你最近心情的歌曲名
Oh Come All Ye Faithful (因为下一句是Joyful and Triumphant....)
26.你喜欢忙碌的生活么？ 喜欢，这样就有理由不回答那些闲着没事的人的点名了。 5月21日 AdvertisementThe Adventures of Chen Xing
Author: Amadeus
Suggested Price: ₤19.99
Coming Soon in June! Possibly in May!
You simply will love it!--Nanjing Times An absolute must-read.--The Nanjinese
Sorry if I have sounded half, or possibly, completely luny. I am just so excited to be home again! I just love the sight of Papa and Mama, of my bed, of Chinese food, and of Chopsticks! I even love the sophocating heat now in Nanjing. It is not just a city, it's home. 5月10日 Im Wunderschönen Monat MaiHaha, I knew that last piece was too much for you to comment on :p
I am listening to Fritz singing Schumann's Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai when writing this entry. It occurs to me that this really is Der Wunderschonen Monat May! --
I have just had a week off on May Day holiday.
I am having this week off for the department is letting me stay at home to prepare for the London speech (as if I would!).
I am off to England next week. ENGLAND! MY! I have been craving to go there ever since the age of 14.
I shall have the week after that off for it is our traditional Freshmen Drama Week and all the relating English courses(that's about all the courses I have got) are off.
Oh I love this word OFF!
For those of you who might take an interest, here is my schedule for next week:
May. 13th: Leaving for Beijing at 21:40 with Mama.
May.14th: Arriving in Beijing at around 6:40. Rushing to the airport. (I am on my own for this point on). Plane leaving at 11:25.
Reaching London at around 15:25 Greenwich time.
May. 17th(Greenwich time): Contest. (PRAY THOU FOR ME! I SHALL BE MOST GRATEFUL.)
May. 20th(Greenwich time): Plane leaving for Beijing at 16:20 GMT
May. 21st (Beijing time): Arriving in Beijing at around 9:00. Another plane heading for Nanjing at around 12:00.
May.22nd: I am entitled to recuperate for a day at home, am I not? :)
~~~Planning to return to school on the 23rd in time for the performance~~~
As usuasl, that song to boost up my confidence before I leave.
I have often dreamt
Of a far off place
Where a great warm welcome
Will be waiting for me
Where the crowds will cheer
When they see my face
And a voice keeps saying
This is where I meant to be
I will find my way
I can go the distance
I don't care how far
Somehow I'll be strong
I know every mile
Will be worth my while
I will go almost anywhere to find where I belong
I will beat the odds
I can go the distance
I will face the world
Fearless, proud, and strong,
I will please the gods,
I can go the distance,
Till I find my hero's welcome
Right where I belong.
Alright, that's all.
Wish me luck! 5月7日 Karl Barth on Mozart A Parable of the Kingdom: the Music of Mozart
In 1923, Adolf von Harnack accused Barth of urging an implicitly gnostic attitude to human culture: "[your assessment] can be understood as a radical denial of every valuable understanding of God within the history of man's thought and ethics." Also, "If Goethe's pantheism, Kant's conception of God or related points of view are merely opposities of real statements about God, how can it be avoided that these statements are given over to barbarism?" Barth's theological interpretation of culture remains a matter of controversy amongst his commentators. However, his reflections on Mozart - for whose music Barth had a life-long passion - provide us with a practical example of his developing a positive relationship between the Gospel and the cultural achievements Harnack accused him of giving "over to barbarism." After Barth's "Letter to Mozart," are extracts taken from an address given at the Salzburg Mozart Festival.
LETTER OF THANKS TO MOZART
My dear Conductor and Court Composer:
Someone got the curious idea of inviting me and a few others to write a "letter of thanks to Mozart" for his newspaper. At first I shook my head and even looked at the wastebasket. But if there is anything which has to do with you I can say "No" only in the rarest cases. And did you not also write more than one somewhat funny letter during your lifetime? So, why not? They certainly know more there where you dwell now, unimpeded by time and space, about each other and about us than do we ourselves down here. Thus I actually do not doubt that you have known for a long time how grateful I have been to you almost all my life and always will remain. Nevertheless why shouldn't you read this in black and white?
Two excuses have to be made first. Number one: I am one of those Protestants of whom you are supposed to have said once that we were unable to understand properly the meaning of Agnus Dei, qui talus peccata mundi. Pardon me, probably you are now better informed on that. However, I do not want to bother you with theology. Believe it or not, I actually dreamed of you last week. Here is the dream: I had to examine you (why, I don't even understand, myself). I knew that under no circumstances would you be allowed to fail the examination. I asked you about the meaning of "dogmatics" and "dogma," by pointing in the most friendly way to your Masses, which I like especially. But to my great regret I got not the least answer from you!! Don't you think we'd better give this point a blessed rest?
The second excuse is far more complicated. I have learned that you could enjoy only the praise of connoisseurs, even in your childhood. As you know, there are not only musicians but also musicologists on this earth. You yourself were both. I am neither the one nor the other. I play no instrument nor do I have the faintest idea about the theory of harmony, let alone the mysteries of "counterpoint." Those very musicologists disturbed me deeply whose books I tried to decipher when I drew up an address for the recent celebration of your two hundredth birthday. By the way, I c5annot help thinking that if I were young and had to start this kind of studying I would clash with a few of your most outstanding theoretical interpreters in the same way that I did with my theological masters forty years ago. But be that as it may, how can I, under these circumstances, thank you as a connoisseur? In other words, how can I make you happy?
To my relief, I have also read that you sometimes made music for hours and hours for very lowly people. This you did only because you somehow had the feeling that they were pleased to listen to you. In this way, with a repeatedly delighted ear and heart I have heard and still hear you play. I myself am so utterly naive that I cannot tell in which of the thirty-four periods of your life, according to the classification of Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, you are nearest to my heart. Surely, surely, you began to become really great, let's say, about 1785. But I hope I won't hurt your feelings (or will I?) in confessing the following: It has been and always will be impossible for me to listen without deep emotion not only to Don Giovanni and to your last symphonies, to the Magic Flute and the Requiem but no less to the "Hafiner" Serenade and the Eleventh Divertimento, etc. Actually, I am deeply moved even by Bastien and Bastienne! Consequently, you are interesting and dear to me much earlier than the moment when you can be praised as the "pioneer" of Beethoven!
What I owe you, frankly, is this: whenever I listen to your music I feel led to the threshold of a world which is good and well ordered, in sunshine and thunderstorm, by day and by night. Thus you have repeatedly given me, a human being of the twentieth century, courage (not haughtiness!), tempo (not exaggerated tempo!), purity (not boring purity!) and peace (not complacent peace !). If he really digests your musical dialectics he can be young and become old, he can work and relax, he can be gay and depressed; in short, he can live. You know now, far better than I, that much more is necessary for that purpose than the very best music. But there is music which helps men to this end (ex post and only incidentally!) and other music which cannot help toward it. Your music helps. This I have experienced all my life (I am going to be seventy years old and if you were living you would dwell in our midst as a patriarch of two hundred years!). Moreover, I am convinced that our century, which is becoming more and more obscure, especially needs your help. For both these reasons I am grateful to you that you have lived, that you wanted to make and did make pure music in the few decades of your life, and that you still live in your music. Please believe me that many, many ears and hearts, scholarly and unscholarly, just as my own, still like to hear you for ever and ever - not only in the year of your jubilee.
I have only a hazy feeling about the music played there where you now dwell. I once formulated my surmise about that as follows: whether the angels play only Bach in praising God I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart and that then also God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them. Well, this alternative may be wrong. Besides, you know that better than I do, anyhow. I mention this only in order to hint metaphorically at my meaning.
And so, with all my heart,
yours,
KARL BARTH
from Barth's Mozart Festival Address, "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."
In other words, Mozart's Figaro has nothing to do with the ideas of the French Revolution and Don Giovanni has nothing to do with the myth of the eternal libertine (as Kierkegaard asserted!). Certainly there does not exist a special Mozartian "philosophy of Cosi fan tutte" either, and one should not read too much "humanity-religion" and/or political mysteries into Mozart's Magic Flute. The fact is that, whether we like it or not (and it can be seen in his letters), neither the nature surrounding him nor the history, literature, philosophy or politics of his time touched him directly or in a concrete sense. Nor was he moved to represent or proclaim any decisions or dogmas. It is to be feared that he never read much, and he certainly never speculated or taught. There is no Mozartian metaphysics either. He sought and found only his musical possibilities, themes and tasks in the world of nature and spirit. With God, the world, men, himself, heaven and earth, life - and, above all, death - before his eyes, in his ears and in his heart he was an unproblematic person. For that reason he was a free man, in a way which was apparently allowed, ordered and therefore exemplary for him.
This involves the fact that his music was uniquely free from every exaggeration, basic friction and contradiction. The sun shines but does not dazzle the eyes, nor demolish nor scorch. Heaven arches above the earth but does not press upon or crush and swallow it. And so earth remains earth, but without being forced to hold its own against heaven in titanic revolt. In the same way darkness, chaos, death and hell render themselves conspicuous but are not allowed to prevail even for a moment. Mozart makes music, knowing everything from a mysterious center, and thus he knows and keeps the boundaries on the right and on the left, upward and downward. He observes moderation. Again he wrote, in 1781, that "the emotions, strong or not, never should be expressed ad nauseam and that music, even in the most horrible situation, never must offend the ears but must please them nevertheless. In other words, music must always remain music." He was (and I quote Grillparzer's beautiful words) the musician "who never did too little, and never did too much, and who always arrived at but never went beyond his goal."
There is no light which does not know the darkness too, no happiness which does not include sorrow; but also inversely, no alarm, no ire, no wailing to the aid of which peace would not come, from near or far. There is no laughter, therefore, without weeping, but no weeping without laughter either. There never was a Mozart of such utter gracefulness that the nineteenth century, after praising him, could grow justly tired of him. But neither did there exist this "demoniac Mozart" whom our century wanted to substitute. The very absence of all demons, the very stopping before the extreme, and precisely the wise confrontation and mixture of the elements (let us say it again) amounts to the freedom in which the true vox humana speaks in Mozart's music. In it the entire scale is unmuffled, but at the same time undistorted and uncramped. Whoever correctly hears him, may, as the human being he really is, feel himself understood and called to freedom: as the clever Basilio, the affectionate Cherubino, as Don Giovanni, the hero, or as the coward Leporello, as the gentle Pamina or the raging Queen of the Night, as the all-forgiving Countess, the terribly jealous Electra, the wise Sarastro and the foolish Papageno all of whom lie hidden in us. Or we may think, as all of us do, of ourselves as persons destined for death, who yet live on and on.
Something at the last, however, must be perceived and mentioned. Mozart's center is not like that of the great theologian Schleiermacher, identical with balance, neutralization and finally indifference. What happened in this center is rather a splendid annulment of balance, a turn in the strength of which the light rises and the shadow winks but does not disappear; happiness outdistances sorrow without extinguishing it and the "Yes" rings stronger than the still-existing "No." Notice the reversal of the great dark and the little bright experiences in Mozart's life! "The rays of the sun disperse the night" - that's what you hear at the end of the Magic Flute. The play may or must still proceed or start from the very beginning. But it is a play which in some Height or Depth is winning or has already won. This directs and characterizes it. One will never perceive equilibrium, and for that reason uncertainty or doubt, in Mozart's music. This is true of his operas as well as of his instrumental music, and especially of his church music. Is not each Kyrie or Miserere, even if it begins at the lowest depth, carried by the trust that the prayer for grace has in fact been answered? Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini! In Mozart's version he has apparently already arrived. Dona nobis pacem! This prayer, too, has already been answered in Mozart's music, in spite of everything. For this very reason his church music has to be called truly spiritual music, in spite of all well-known objections. Mozart never lamented, never quarreled. He would have been entitled to do so. Instead, he always executed that comforting turn which is priceless for everyone who hears it. That seems to me, as far as it can be explained at all, to be the secret of his freedom and thereby the nucleus of his singular quality, for which we asked at the beginning.
I leave one question unanswered: How is it possible that I, an evangelical Christian and theologian, can so proclaim Mozart? How could I do this even though he was such a Catholic and even a Freemason and besides through and through nothing else than just a musician? He who has ears to hear has certainly heard. May I ask all the others, who perhaps shake their heads in astonishment and alarm, to be momentarily contented with the general reference to the fact that the New Testament speaks not only about the kingdom of heaven, but also of the parables of the kingdom of heaven?
"Wenn die Engel vor Gott dem Herrn musizieren, dann spielen sie Bach; wenn sie unter sich sind, spielen sie Mozart." |
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