Moments

The Welsh baritone Cai Thomas is (I think) eighteen years old now. He has the most beautiful voice. Here he is, just this last Christmas, singing O Holy Night. A voice so sure and true. I love it.

But listening to it made me think about about the way life passes, and the memories we hold in our hearts, of times that will never return. The chances we have that belong to particular circumstances and relationships and occasions. 

The Japanese have a wonderful term for this — ichi go ichi e — which means pretty much "one encounter one chance" expressing the fleeting nature of the moments life offers us.

There's a glorious speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that goes like this: 

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Those words carry the same haunting sense of a moment which, once gone, will never come again. Ichi go ichi e. Yes, there will be other moments of course — life is full of moments — but there are times that take your breath away, that are part of the reason you came to this earth to experience the human condition with all its terrors and uncertainties, moments that you know you will treasure for ever, all the more precious because they will never ever come again. Times that, whether in public life or just personally in your own heart, make you what you are; crossroads moments. It can be about a decision or an insight or a choice — or it can simply be a moment of sheer beauty and joy, and you are different for having experienced it.

What made me think of these moments, these bright jewels of life that are fleetingly ours then gone for ever, is this video of Cai Thomas six years ago, before he matured from a treble to a baritone. Here he is singing the Laudate Dominum from Mozart's Vespers.

Cai Thomas now, today, has the most beautiful voice; but I'm so glad that memory of him singing as a twelve-year-old boy was captured and recorded — that time which was ours for a while and will never come again.