He’s got incredible technique. The Moors (North African Arabs) conquered all but a small region of north-central Spain, and this song is in part about the origins (mythic) of more recent Catholic Spain.
See also: El Cid, The Reconquest, Isaac Albeniz, Andres Segovia
“It is a common empiricist assumption that I can know my experience simply by observing it. But this is not so. I do not observe my experience, but only its object. Any knowledge of experience must therefore involve knowledge of its object. But I can have knowledge of the object only if I can identify it as continous. Nothing can have temporal continuity without also having the capacity to exist when unobserved. Its existence is therefore independent of my perception.”
-Roger Scruton here.
This is part of a brief summary of Kant’s transcendental deduction, of which Scruton later says:
“It is fair to say that the transcendental deduction has never been considered to provide a satisfactory argument (boldface mine). In all its versions it involves a transition from the unity of consciousness to the identity of the subject through time. Hume pointed out that the slide from unity to identity is involved in all our claims to objective knowledge; he also thought that it could never be justified. Kant did not find the terms with which to answer Hume.”
The best version I’ve found. I’ve always really enjoyed this song. It’s light but deep…playful even.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I think this is one of the better poems in the English language. At first look, I see at least Shakespeare and Emerson.
It is one thing to have such thoughts, and quite another to turn them into objects of beauty, a world of artifice and depth.