I’m late, it seems. But I’ve been busy; I had to drive home from college, and, since I’m graduating (or, I have graduated…I’m not sure on the time frame), I had to pack all my worldly possessions and haul them all back with me. Rest assured that, as soon as this (brief) post is finished, I will head right back into the admin interface and start Moment the Seventh.

The moment in question here is the first time I heard (or, maybe, comprehended via subtitles) those fateful lyrics from Aria the Animation’s opening: “I close my eyes, and can see” (目を閉じて見えてくる/me wo tojite mietekuru). I know I’ve written at length about that line before, about how it makes me think of James Joyce and, via him, Thomas Aquinas, but I didn’t settle on it as a moment because it excited my English majorish tendencies (though I suppose that helped). Its significance to me goes deeper than that: it signaled a change in my preferences, in the way I assign personal value to stories.

Rather, while the change had been creeping up on me all along, Aria’s OP first made it clear. I realized, upon hearing those lyrics, that Aria would be like nothing I’d experienced thus far — not because it was truly different on some fundamental level, but because I’d actually be able to enjoy it for what it was worth. It occurred to me that, probably thanks in large part to my involving myself in blog-based discourse, the range of stories in which I could find value was steadily increasing, and that’s never a bad thing. So, really, though hearing Aria’s OP hammered the change home, I owe this moment to all of you. Thanks.

Now that I think about it, this doesn’t have much to do with the actual content of the lyrics in question. But I suppose that’s how these things go.

Tags: aria the animation

Thus spake Pontifus on Friday, 19 December 2008 at 2:06 am, and Anime expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.