Where words end, music begins

In amongst the Inner Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland, Nature has placed one of her greatest marvels, namely Fingal’s Cave, its enormous entrance rising in barren grandeur from the ocean, lined with innumerable fluted columns. Within lies a kind of natural throne imposing enough to suggest the kingly seat of Neptune himself. When a storm is raging, the scene at Fingal's Cave is said to be sublime.

The prolific Scottish writer and poet, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), described it as "one of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld, baffling all description” and induced Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) to make a storm-tossed visit there in 1829. The sight and sound of the sea swell tumbling into the Cave made a profound impression on the young 20 year old composer. The theme which he later developed into his ever-popular Hebrides Overture apparently occurred to him on this trip, immortalizing the mystical aura of this curious freak of nature.

The most striking aspect of the music is its otherworldly tone-painting quality. One can hear the haunting breaking of waves, almost see the basalt columns and strange colors, and overall, sense the overwhelming vastness of the cave:

Flynn who?

A widely held hypothesis is that people lose intelligence as they age, the so-called Flynn Effect, arrived at by comparing IQ tests of elderly people with today's young people. This flys in the face of comparisons of IQ scores of these same "elderly" people to their own era (a half a century before) where apparently IQ losses with age are minimal. One has to wonder about the IQ test makers themselves. Surely they've changed along with their various indeterminate intelligence "measuring" devices. Who knows? Where's Einstein when you need him?

"Great God! this is an awful place..."

This is a stunning picture of a man standing at the south pole a century ago after a grueling trek, man-hauling sleds some 800 miles, and now facing the same going back. Conditions were appalling: temperatures plummeting to minus 45 degrees F., nearly impassable terrain, blinding blizzards, or blinding sunshine. "Great God! this is an awful place..."* he wrote in his journal at the time in 1912, before long distance communications and airplanes. He and his four companions didn’t make it back, and their fate was unknown for almost a year after they had actually perished. A sense of the foreboding inevitableness of a doomed expedition is etched in the man’s anguished face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLeOl0yj0-A&feature=related

_______________________________________________________________

*This remarkable iconic photo taken 17Jan12 (discovered in a tent a year later with their frozen bodies) shows British explorer Robert Scott [left] and his companions having just arrived at the South pole. It dramatically conveys in their unposed postures the dazed dismay and deep disappointment they feel at the crushing discovery that the Norwegians had beaten them to the pole just four weeks earlier. Scott's discouragement is painfully palpable in his journal entry for that day:

“Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow. ... Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it”.