God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Takénobu
I love swift little layers of cello like this; there’s something about the resonance of a bow drawn under gentle sudden notes that gets me immediately bought into an arrangement. This is a new arrangement of quite an old carol. On archive.org you can, delightfully, read a cranky broadside from 1824 about how “in London, excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen,’ or a like doggrel, nothing in the shape of Carols is heard”.
Given its age, it’s perhaps not surprising that the lyrics are quite religious. I notice my atheist’s attention settling more on tidings of comfort and joy than satan’s power and might. There are some aspects of faith that I find appealing; when I first read the opening line of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of in a newspaper, I immediately cut it out for a collage: I don’t believe in god, but I miss Him. It seems rather nice to believe in cosmic justice, and an omniscient power enforcing it.
I struggle with other aspects. I know not all Christians believe in hell, and some believe in a gentler “it’s sad to be separated from god” notion of it, rather than the “boiling for eternity in a literal lake of fire” vision, but… some do believe in souls that are condemned to eternal suffering, and I don’t really understand the emotional or moral appeal of that. I can understand believing it because everyone around you does, but I’m highly skeptical of my instinct to explain away someone’s disagreement with me as a product of their ignorance. More likely a failure of empathy on my part; sometimes my attempts to follow the principle of charity look less like avoiding strawman arguments and more like inventing a version of my interlocutor who is more similar to me. But the beliefs that appeal to other people might look nothing like what appeals to me!
It would be nice to believe in a cosmic consensus, and that what separates humanity from the chance to with true love and brotherhood each other now embrace are mere unfortunate misunderstandings, but I can’t quite convince myself of this.
Comforted by like doggerels,
Tessa