Autumn in the winelands brings the cherished Light Art at Spier
The ‘wow factor’ is here in abundance: installations shimmering across the water, a quirky interactive piece, a puzzling projection
Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet, my melancholic earworm this week, is a meditation on mortality: Dylan wrote the song in 1997 after a brush with death. When he sings “I was born here, and I’ll die against my will”, he is expressing the defining feature of the human condition — borrowed, in this wording, from the Jewish Talmud (though it could be from Buddhism, Stoicism or another philosophical tradition).
The inevitability of death from the moment we are born is both emboldening and terrifying. Yet it’s not just the individual journey from cradle to grave that lends this track its elegiac quality, landing somewhere between mourning and grim determination. When Dylan bemoans a “world of lies” in which he finds no encouragement “in anyone’s eyes”, a political undercurrent comes briefly to the surface...
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