Stanford Summer Chorus

Milan Kundera says in his "Ignorance" that to a girl who's suffering from nostalgia of her first boy, her subsequent life and encounters would be filled with details that so coincidentally bear tremendous amounts of resemblance to her first love (perhaps until youth, the period of our lives that's quite evasive in definition of duration, eventually passes on).

I'm not sure why I'm starting with this. Could I want to present some textbook proof to ZK that girls do mourn and extend symbolic meanings to their first love as well as boys do? Perhaps for a less extended period of time as the poetry wears away. Which would ultimately say youth passes on and practicality sets in earlier in women. Still the poetry, rhyme, echoes and recurrences of themes, in other words memory and nostalgia, are the enduring elements that keep my heart stirring and my life breathing.

I joint a Stanford Summer Chorus program which includes 1.5 months or so of rehearsal before a performance in the Memorial Church. I thought that sounds very much like Stanford's equivalent of Sage Chapel. The parallels were way more than simply that, I realised, when I got to the first rehearsal last night. I have actually sung the two short pieces (Purcell's "O Lord Thou Knowest the Secrets of Our Hearts and Tavener's "Song for Athene") before. The familiar church-going-old-folks type of community and jokes, the scramble for score-recording (the Chinese simplified version) at an unfamiliar tune, funny and hyper conductors, the warm ups, these things were so immediately recognizable that they electrified me in realizing how much of a habit Cornell Chorale had become for me in the past. What's different though (and very much different it is), is that I'd been so shy before. It hadn't been my type of music of course, and it had been difficult to characterize and assimilate into an entirely foreign culture. I've relied solely on introspection. Now it feels like waking up one day with all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle magically in place. I know things. I know how to do them now. The ease with which I smiled with the music (instead of yawning with it, for in Cornell I had been eternally sleepy) felt brand new. Singing had never been so fun. It was like re-discovering a treasure that took too much energy to regard highly in the past.

Nevertheless I suspect what rendered this magic was ZK's presence - so much so for personal development and achievement. ZK's extraversion and focus at fresh and interesting events (interesting enough for the first hour, at any rate) is definitely contagious. With lingering dread for expectations falling through though, I have not forgotten how to test my waters and take cautious steps for the next 1.5 months.