We like to think we’re pretty awesome, we humans. After all, we’ve “mastered” the whole, you know, surviving thing. Our ancestors didn’t freeze when it got rllycold. And stuff.

Furthermore, we’re smart, aren’t we? We create cool gadgets to do things for us. And to entertain us.

But we are far from perfect beings. We are animalistic yet intelligent, emotional yet logic-minded. Whatever happened to truth being simple and beautiful? We, by those standards, must be far from truth.

We are a society in which porn exists simultaneously with higher mathematics, and where one person can enjoy both in the same day, hour, minute. Where the physical and the intellectual necessarily collide. Are we animals or are we something more? Are we purely chemical-reactionary or is there something more complex going on? Can anything more complex coexist in a stable form with our simpler chemical mechanisms?

Should it?

What would we, as a society, be like without sex? I won’t impose my own ideas upon you, but it would be something to think about. Aside from religion, aside from the problem of reproduction, aside from it, you know, feeling good.

You think I’m joking, but really there’s nothing to joke about. We are biological and organic and awkward. We have broken the mold by reaching for the stars, by thinking about the world around us, and now we must choose to go all the way or continue a naturally awkward existence, the latter of which may lead to our early demise.

Perhaps this is not the point in human history to bring this up. We do, after all, have a long way to go before  robotics and cognitive science produce any major breakthroughs in innately enhancing our life experience. Perhaps, in a couple of decades, we will be ready to move beyond the constraints of our organic bodies.

When that time comes, though, we will be sexless and pure. We will be simple and beautiful. We will be Truth.

The thing that gets me about Sibelius’ music, as opposed to that of older Romantics like Brahms or Beethoven, or of classicists like Mozart or Haydn, is that there’s a certain element of reality. Everything is not perfect and clean-cut, but rather the tonal structure is organic, like a seed growing into a flower. And the multitude of complexities never leave you with the feeling that you “get it” and can “move on,” but rather allows you to pursue the depth as much as you want, because there are so many levels between you and rock-bottom. Just as the sediments of the earth’s surface build, layer by layer, into an impressively organic and unique structure, so does a Sibelius symphony, with tonal colors swirling and changing, prove to you how much life there can be in a single moment.

Anyway. Listen to the above and you’ll see what I mean.