Life, death, and passion

[Inspiration: "Burn Out Bright" by Switchfoot]

I'm a voice major at university, which means I get to sing a lot of songs by famous dead composers across history.

One thing I've noticed is that behind that German or the sweet-sounding French, the lyrics will often be saying things like, "Deep forest shadows, you cannot be black enough to shroud my misery," or "I will surely die unless you requite my unshakable love." Maybe it's a good thing they're usually concealed behind a foreign language, because I feel like these lyrics are a tad intense for the average North American.

We don't like passion. We say we do, and we watch movies where people can be passionate for us, where people can die for a cause or wait 40 years for their long lost love to return or anything dramatic. But when it comes to real life, we'd rather hide behind jaded cynicism.

We are the society that tells our children fairy tales and then proceeds to mock them. We make kids believe in Santa Claus and then tell them he's not real. We tell kids to have dream jobs, and think it's cute when 5 year olds want to be firefighters or astronauts or pop stars, but when it comes time for college we tell them to become accountants and doctors and lawyers. We watch movies where people die for their lovers, but when we get home we criticize our loves ones and take our bad moods out on them instead of sacrificing anything.

That's why I find these songs so refreshing. They voice feelings that I never dared to let penetrate the surface. They make me feel like I'm not alone.

I know that nowadays they still have lyrics that are more on the dramatic side, but everyone calls them emo kids and laughs at their Chuck Taylors and side bangs. Including me.

But if you have passion in your heart, why let the world kill it?

You'll just become like them.

Back in the day when these classical songs were composed, people died of things like war or childbirth or plagues. Something on the outside, something that gave meaning to their death. Romeo and Juliet died, yes, but they died for each other. Nowadays we don't die of any of those things. . .least of all for love. We die of things like cancer. We die from the inside.