Arvo Pärt - Spiegel Im Spiegel

I was watching a movie last night which had a little bit of this clip in it, and it reminded me of this, which I love and have watched over and over again. A perfect pairing of music and image: I look at all these people and think about how this was just an ordinary day of their lives, and how different yet the same the world was then. And how every single person in this video is now dead. It's kind of the same feeling as when I opened the refrigerator two days after my father died, and found his half-eaten Chinese takeout dinner, or my daughter who was telling me the other day how she keeps forgetting she's not pregnant. Life is here, and then it's gone.

What were their worries? What urgent business were they out on? Is the man rushing across the street trying to get to the bank to pay his mortgage on time? Is the woman strolling down the sidewalk in love? It all seemed so important to them, and now none of it matters...except maybe it does. Maybe the man paid his mortgage and was able to pass his farm to his son, who passed it to his, who built it into a successful family business that still runs today and provides for dozens or hundreds or thousands of people. Maybe the woman in love married the man who loved her, and their seventy-two great-great grandchildren are alive now. Maybe someone caught on film that day was the ancestor of someone who's going to cure cancer, or write a book that will change the world. Maybe one of them is my ancestor, or yours.