Katherine Sets the Rules for Our Posts

Here I am bringing some of the characters from my book The Handel Letters to life again to see what our thinking about Handel and his times might inspire in us today.

From Katherine:  A fair number of you have responded to me.  Many thanks for that. I am encouraged to move ahead with this admittedly half-baked plan. I hope we will all find it an enjoyable, maybe even helpful, activity.  Before I open the gates to this collaborative commentary, let me add one further bit of information about some of my own thoughts that have entered my mind since our last face-to-face meeting of the Handel Seminar. 

At the very beginning of this reset of our seminar, I reminded you all of the sad passing of our dear Forella.  So many of us in this group are now what the world considers elders, and as such we face losing more and more friends, spouses, relatives, even children or other much younger associates.  And we inevitably think about our own mortality.  I expect this will more often be a part of our discussion.  I welcome this opportunity to “think aloud” about this theme, and I hope you do not find the notion of such straightforward discussion disturbing. I appreciate your helping me handle these sometimes worrisome thoughts.

I often read commentary that chastises America in general for skirting around the issue of death.  The English language has various acceptable euphemisms, such as, “passing away,” or “passing on,” or more religious notions, such as, “gone to heaven” or “went to be with Jesus.” Most often these idioms do not suggest that death is an ending, a final closing of a life.  I warn you now that this troublesome notion of what death represents for me, for each of us, is something I need to explore with you.  As I lose friends and think about Handel’s death, so many years ago, I feel some incentive to think long and hard about this aspect of my overall philosophy of life. You have been warned.

And now, let me outline here the very sketchy rules of this little venture.  First, as I mentioned earlier, please start your commentary with your name, as I have done (From Katherine).  Just your first name is sufficient. So far at least, we have no two participants with the same first name.  Second, our helpful editor has agreed to post our commentaries on her website, but she asks that we expect her to publish only one such post per day (or maybe every other day). These posts will appear under her “Musings & Margins” section and will be identified by a Handel logo . And third, try to keep your individual posts to four or five paragraphs at most.  I will try to oversee the order of posts as they will be coming into me and usually posts will be offered in response to some earlier post by someone else. Please be patient with this process.  It IS experimental.  We will just have to see how it goes.

Thanks, everyone, for being a part of this.  To repeat, please do ask anyone who is part of your own inner circle to join us if they feel intrigued and hopefully committed to this kind of collective commentary.  And, of course, please encourage anyone who wishes to join us to read the earlier record of our correspondence in The Handel Letters.  I look forward to our time, words, texts, together.