Hurricane Isabel has come and gone, and Thom and I are okay.
Last night while we listened to the winds gusting through the trees, I, not one to let an opportunity for superfluous literary allusion go unseized, recalled the following bit of Shakespeare—not verbatim, alas; in fact at the time I only remembered the first line—from appropriately enough, The Tempest:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again. (III.ii)
Mmm. (Okay, so maybe Isabel was a bit less delightful.) And then Thom suggested we listen to Holst’s The Planets or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I added some Orff, namely Carmina Burana, to the hypothetical storm-soundtrack. Yeah, we’re nerds.