This song always takes me back to a specific time and place:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx9br5ISRpo
Back to precisely where, and exactly when, is irrelevant to my point (as is the message of the song, whose mysterious, haunting tone bewitches me still), which is that music accesses different parts of ourselves than movies or books, text or images. We hear something, a song, and we're doing something else, profound or trival, or both at one and the same time, and then later, ten years or twenty years down the line, the song emerges from inside of ourselves, or out of the radio, and it's as if time and space have collapsed in upon themselves. We are twenty again, or perhaps we have always been twenty, even at birth, and we will be once again at death. Faulkner knew that the past isn't even past, but it's also not only present. It points towards a future we can't yet glimpse, or sense, or imagine. A cold wind blows upon our necks as the song sings its glorious, nostalgic, mournful chorus. The sky in stasis so far above is grey and distant, almost mocking, and yet: no matter. From my past my younger self declares (or I hereby order him to proclaim): "I will remember this moment, dread this moment, savor this moment, fucking feel this moment when fate or chance decides to play out its tune for me a last and glorious time."
