#atals

hey keep this as a secret between us but i think yr cute 😳😳😳 - you'll never guess who this is

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father's generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don't recall it's name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and time itself shall come to an end. To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants and foot-soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists and, most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization's architects, masons and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer's profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, 'Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!' How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes because the winter is eternal and because if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.