Real Music

The past several entries have been, simply, what I consider music to be, and to be about.  All of it being, so far, composed and first performed in the 18th Century, during an age without sanitation and virtually without hygiene, long before the invention of anesthesia or the very concept of antisepsis, much less antibiotics; but, for all that, seemingly, an age when the finest sensibilities of humankind, as evidenced in its art and music, were cultivated.  The reason, probably, that there have been no more Rutgers harpsichords or Stradivarius violins in the past couple of centuries, is that we have all--even the Dutch and the Italians--lost the ability to hear as acutely as the making of such instruments requires.  Which, when I think about it, is rather horrifying.  What if, for example, children, even babies, have as many nerve endings in their bodies as they will when they mature--and if it were that the reason, that children so dread hypodermic needles and scream in such agony when hypodermic injections are administered to them, is that their nerve-endings, being concentrated in their smaller bodies, are proportionately much more severely damaged than they are in an adult.  Frankly, I don't doubt it--and it would explain why those monsters who find the infliction of pain "interesting," such as Giles de Retz and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq, are so fond of torturing children--who respond with maximum intensity to the torments inflicted on them.  As philosophers of BDSM, imagining that they are complimenting themselves, are fond of saying (anent intensity), "For ordinary Vanilla Folk, sex is a pleasure; for connoisseurs of humiliation, degradation and pain, it is extasy."