WEBVTT

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Yeah, so this is another one
of these neighborhood poems.

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And one of my favorite
pieces of music

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is the Bach "Cello Suite" as
it's played by Pablo Casals.

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And probably most of you know
that the story of Casals being,

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I think, about 12 or 13 years
old when he found the sheet

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music for these cello suites.

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And up until the time that
he made the recording--

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he made the recording 30 years.

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It took him 30 years.

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He decided he wasn't
ready for 30 years

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to make a recording of them.

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And up until that
time, the cello suites

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were considered just kind of
practice music for cellists.

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They weren't something that
you actually played in concert.

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They are just sublime.

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They have everything in them.

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Anyway, the poem is
not really about that.

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Don't worry.

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There's something at the end
of the poem that invokes it.

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Lives, like a bit of shoelace
snapped off and tied back

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on by tight knot frayed,
each of us lives attached

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to the ridiculousness
of suffering--

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according to the
Buddhist, needfully

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with plenty of precedent
and proteges, and of course,

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just trying to deal.

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Am I stronger than I once was?

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Yes.

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But is it enough?

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On the street, parents
with fidgeting babies,

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students with bulging backpacks,
the millennium or two of ideas

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both boneheaded and marvelous.

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Could I take up their
burdens even if I wanted to?

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What about the smokers, the
malted smell of pipe tobacco

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and vast stagecraft recalling
Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern

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shore as it goes up in smoke.

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Or the cemetery staff
the funeral director,

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hearse drivers,
and grave diggers

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aware as they are that a
headstone is heavy enough

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to pin the head in one spot.

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They subdue the
mourning atmosphere.

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Though even for them,
perhaps childhood

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comes back into view
changed once in a while.

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As the summer reading lists
that once seemed to me a bore,

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now look to be filled
with insight and care.

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With mutiny and courage
to spare, never again will

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you find me hating on
those particular books.

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Probably, you too wanted to be
a dress designer, a rifleman,

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or geneticist, or photographer--

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a life of so-called
action, of consequence.

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Perhaps, you ought to
have lived your story

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as a French economist
hell bent on improving

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the lives of grim coal miners.

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The street is wide
enough to hold

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my oldest, most dazzling wishes
but not to let me touch them.

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Put them alongside the
sound of Pablo Casals

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near flawless in playing
"Bach's Cello Suite," though

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and all experience stretches.

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