We’ve seen the horrors that atomic/nuclear power can unleash, and we still develop the technology. That’s about the only thing to know about the human race to know that the world would probably be better off without us. That if there is a god up there in the heavens, he doesn’t think a whole lot of us.

And yet despite how foul we may be, and we are foul, we can turn out a specimen like Krzysztof Penderecki. Maybe every so often The Universe sends us a reminder of what/how we could have been.

I do wonder about that sometimes. About why we are the way we are and of course I wonder why we are (or certainly seem to be) getting worse. The pandemic surely didn’t bring about the best in us, not as a species anyway. Was there a point in time where it would have rallied us? Probably not, except in small batches.

You’ll notice compassion, except outside small, self-interested groups, is notoriously absent in post-apocalypse film and literature. Is that because we either can’t imagine it, or because we know differently already, that we are going to devolve into brutes right away? Or maybe we are already brutes, but with a lofty self-image?

Anyway, Penderecki killed this one. My one reservation with Threnody is that it’s not longer.

But… it exists.