Today I worked on campus, and at lunch I went to the Just Bach concert. Today was choral works; they had two of Johann Sebastian's older cousins also on the program, and one of the pieces was "Furchte Dich Nicht" by Johann Christoph Bach, which I sang with the Lutheran choir ages ago, and which I listen to pretty regularly on YouTube. Which version? All of them! I hadn't heard it live before (other than when I was singing it myself), and it was so beautiful that I cried. The pieces by JS Bach were gorgeous too. Afterwards I saw Pete the Sailor Man and the guy we hiked with at the beginning of the pandemic, and they had a woman with them I hadn't met before. She said, "That was so beautiful, it was almost enough to make me change religions!" since she's Jewish. If you want to hear this music yourself, it will be posted on the Just Bach website on Sunday. You can always find previous concerts there as well.
The Professor Formerly Known As Banjo Player tagged me on social media with a post about how Shakespeare actually threw some Basque into one of his plays, but nobody realized it because it was nonsense words, since he didn't actually know Basque but was kind of familiar with the sound of it. This got me thinking about how, during the pandemic when I took that Basque class online, it made me feel twenty years old again because that was how old I was when I was living over there, studying the language. I am so far from fluent, but it started to come back to me, and even more interesting was when we discussed Basque culture and it actually sounded familiar to me, as if I had grown up in it, because I had lived in it for several months. I did feel a little weird when I was picking up the language more quickly than my classmates, who all had Basque last names, and it felt like they were sort of resentful. That's not to say that I wouldn't do another online Basque class, given the opportunity, but as far as I know, our teacher isn't offering them anymore. They did say I was an "honorary Basque," and they even said I was a distant cousin, since the Irish are supposedly the most genetically similar to the Basques. There is just no substitute for living in a place to really learn the language, and maybe if I ever get a chance to do the Camino, I'll get to speak it again, since that goes right through Basque country. And despite the pleas of many, many of us, DuoLingo shows no interest in creating a Basque course. Bummer!
Famous Hat
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