claudeb | Movies, music and

Content warning: mention of fictional death and real hopelessness.

I watched Soylent Green sometime in my teenage years. After that, a curious thing happened: every time I heard Vivaldi's music, it would make me cringe and feel the chill of death.

Years have passed, and the feeling subsided. But even now, a quarter century later or more, The Spring is funeral music to me...

I think there are three lessons to take from that:

The human mind is a powerful thing.
Art is even more powerful, if anything.
Context is everything.

But the most important takeaway is, we must do everything in our power to avert a future like in that movie. Don't let the world get so bad that people no longer find a reason to live. Hardship and danger we can handle. Together. Losing hope however would be certain death. And the problem with that is, death tends to be very, very final.

Let's make it so that Vivaldi's cheerful music celebrates life again.