You Send Me (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Last night while watching TV, I “accidentally” heard a song by Sam Cooke: A Wonderful World. I heard this song long time ago but never really got chance to know it better. Last night I felt a little different, not only I wanted listen the whole song, but also I wanted to know the lyrics. I don’t usually care about lyrics because I believe music is the “soul” of a song, but this time I felt an urge to know what he was sing about. So I got this from google:
I was literally “electrified’ by these words, especially when they were sung by Cooke’s – God helps me find a right adjective- voice. After some moment of emotional stir, I like to write down why this song means so much to me:
First of all, it relates me personally. As a self-claimed intelligent person who was forced into art profession by tyrannical parents, it was my “life time” pain that I did not get chance to develop my intelligence “academically”. I fought my fate, fought so hard that I almost “died”. At the end of battle, with plenty chronic health problems together with plenty of freedom in hands, I found knowledge, or intelligence no longer matter that much to me.
Secondly, as a person come from a culture that lacks love, I especially appreciate this song. In Chinese mainstream culture, intelligence, or more accurately, “smartness”, is something so “worshiped” that one’s most fear would be being told that he/she was not smart. Though I am a person who respects human intelligence, how this culture practices “intelligence” is something I precisely despise (yes, I mean it!). It seems to me, for a significant amount of people in this culture, intelligence, or smartness, has only one single use: to compete with each other, or to climb to the highest (or as high as possible) position in social hierarchy. Compassion, love, have little rooms in this culture.
Finally, from humanity view. I adore ancient Greek culture, adore knowledge, but more and more I realized, that the best knowledge we could ever have, is just one simplest thing: Love. For a person that know how to love, he/she doesn’t need any thing more. This is exactly what this song expresses in such a simple yet beautiful “fashion”.
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