This is Helena Iara's favorite video at the moment, one that makes me proud of her. Not just because it's cute, or good music, but because it's about as philosophical as children's music gets. Today, I tried to explain to Helena that at the beginning of the modern period, as German and French and English intellectuals used philosophy to think the world, in Spain and Portugal, poetry served the same purpose. The great philosophers of the Iberian peninsula (and its American colonies) didn't write treatises, but poems and novels: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Sor Juana, Pessoa, Neruda... And in the second half of the 20th century, that turned to music: Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Tom Jobim, Milton Nascimento, and many more.
And for kids, the philosopher poet was Toquinho. Here are the lyrics to the last verse of the song above:
And the future is a spaceship
Which we try to drive.
But the future is always hurried and merciless.
There's no right time for it to come,
And without asking or warning us,
It just changes our lives
And then it beckons us
to cry or laugh together
Along this road, it's not our duty
to know or see what's comming to us
No one surely knows where it's heading us to
We're just going on the way
Crossing a beautiful footbridge
Painted in watercolour
which someday will fade after all
In a sheet of paper, I draw an yellow-coloured sun
(which will fade someday)
And with five or six straight lines I easily draw a castle
(which will fade someday)
I just turn a compass around
and with a circle I draw the world
(which will fade someday)
Kurt, this is beautiful, both the poem and the fact that she chooses it. But to be fair, you have to tell us what else you're letting her choose from ;-)
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