Strange Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzGF50nCgi0

Description

I crossed the rusted gate, took the incense, and stepped into the monastery, leaving behind me the bustling street of street-vendors and smell of barbecue.  

I ambled along the cobblestone path, bathed in shattered sunshine from the leaves of the evergreens. Along the path I passed the brick-red temple with carved Oriental roof, a statue of the Buddha smiling mysteriously in the white smoke of incense, and a monk in a grey cloak holding a book. I greeted the temple, the Buddha statue, and the monk in white smoke.

I stopped in front of it. 

Behind the wood and smoke it stood alone, with its dark wooden doors shut. I opened the door, stepped into the doorway, walked downstair to a chamber. It’s the place where visitors are shunned, voices flow silently, and the loved dead are buried and stored. It’s where my grandmother stayed. She smiled in the picture, black and white. She smiled at me there eternally. I kneeled down in front of her, bent down my head until it touched the ground with both of my hands lying on the ground. I stayed still, kneeling silently, heart beating loudly, murmuring faintly. I kneeled down three times and stayed, staring at her silent smile.

I rose up, left behind me the temple, the Buddha, the monk, and the silent smile in black and white. I left her there. 

I returned to the bustling street.

Characterization: Margaret Thatcher

April 8^th, 2013

I was lying in bed at the Ritz. Another stroke had left me with a splitting headache. My sight was blurred and my breathing was labored. “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” But I knew disease is arbitrary. However, by no means had I lost. I was still alive.

It is a long time that I lived, too long for a politician, and too long for a woman. A politician always gets reproached and scorned when she has stayed in the prime minister’s office for too long and done too much. “I've got a woman's ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it,” I always told myself.  It was my job to do the work, but no one’s job to agree with me. “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbor; life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.” 

I’d done so much work: the economy, the enemies of democracy, the Falklands war; and though I had done so much, much remained to be done. But I had to leave. I planned my work and executed my plans, but I would soon be unable. I loved arguments, and I loved debate; I would soon have no one with whom to argue. Denis and Reagan had both left me, and my girls would never return. It was clearly my time to go.  

May the sun never set on the British Empire.