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Mono No Aware

What was yesterday a sharp, white definition of winter is turning into a damp blur today. Panta rhei, Łódź style—everything flows, unveiling the muddy, brownish truth of the earth that feigned innocence for too long.

In my headphones, Sakamoto strikes the keys with precision, yet with extraordinary subtlety. The 2009 album which the algorithm recommended and it couldn’t have struck a better chord. This music is the perfect score for melting snow—minimal, crystalline, full of space and that Japanese melancholy: mono no aware (the awe of impermanence).

Between one note and the next, there is as much silence as there is between those black bare trees on the horizon. The music doesn’t interrupt the landscape. It translates it, providing the soundtrack. Every piano note is a droplet falling from a branch in the gap between one silence and another.

The sun hides behind the clouds as if they were a dirty windowpane. It offers no heat, only mood. It is

 merely a pale afterimage—a stage spotlight slowly dimming, signaling that the show is coming to an end. It is a threshold moment, devoid of drama. Just a quiet acceptance of the ephemeral. An opus for a world currently changing its state of matter.

I walk on. My boots sink into the remnants of the snow. I am an observer. Silence all around. The kind where you can hear your own thoughts.

And that piano. Sakamoto does something incredible on this album—he takes his "greatest hits" (like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence or The Sheltering Sky) and strips them of everything superfluous. What remains is the naked basis of emotion. Only the essence remains—me and melancholy in C minor.

I am melting.


Just a short impression today, because the universe treated me to a real feast and I wanted to share it. But tomorrow is Happy Friday, so expect two new dramatic scenes. Come back soon.


Pale circle of sun,
Caught in the naked branches,
One pure, single tone.


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