A Great Song Can Still Be Heard

BE AS GREEN, my friends, as you possibly can be. We don’t want, do we, our once beautiful planet to fail? Yes, I’ve rented a space elsewhere, but I hope to make happy visits back to Planet Earth again and again. So — naturally — I don’t want to see it lapse into a stark landscape of dry fields and cracking pavements.

No trees. And nothing left of human life.

Think of the great arts this little globe has fostered that others would never know. Not one dear word of Charles Dickens would remain. No Hamlet. No Rites of Spring. No Degas. No Maria Callas. No Marriage of Figaro.

Edgar Degas

What’s to visit in a place like that?

No YouTube to salvage a few broken bits of our artistry. No blogosphere, with all that it could relate about us in its intricate and magical way.

IN MY SADDEST MOODS, I imagine our ruined planet this way: floating over its tragic wastes, as if from spaces beyond, is one magnificent song that has not died. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

J. S. Bach is smiling over us.

Yes, he is smiling as Planet Earth revolves, faithfully, in it ancient orbit, and turns on its old-time axis in just the right rotation for life to have existed there.

WRITING THE ABOVE, I resort in my imaginings to the Earth-net and listen once more to renderings of the Great Song.

I remember a wonderful book, Eaarth, by the Earthling Bill McKibben. He had given our planet this new name — Ea-arth — because he felt that the one-a’ed Earth, with all its glories of the past, no longer quite remained. Still, he advised us this way: “Let’s save what we can — while we can — of our wonderful Planet Earth!”

From my perch near the Outer Gates, I’ll be watching to see a healed and replenished Earth. So again I abjure you — be as Green, my friends, as you possibly can be, and on my return l’ll be Green beside you!