71 plays
december 31
John Lennon - Imagine
This final track is curated by Taped Together co-creator Maria Popova / @brainpicker
As artificial a time-keeper as the calendar is, its greatest claim to purpose is perhaps its capacity to make us look back on a segment – a month, a year, a decade – and size up its impact on culture, civilization and ourselves. The end of 2009 is all the more monumental a hallmark because it also wraps up the first decade of a new century, and what better way to greet the blank slate that is before us than with Lennon’s iconic anthem to hope and peace?
The irony, of course, is that we’ve come a long way – culturally, technologically, industrially – since Imagine was written 40 years ago. Just in the past decade, we discovered water on Mars, dreamt up augmented reality, elected Obama, and sequenced 99% of the human genome project with 99% accuracy. Yet despite all this incredible evolution, we’ve practically devolved on the peace front, kicking Lennon’s vision to the curb and spitting on it a little bit before moving on to more exciting things. Litigation, digitization, flashturbation. But what about imagination? Our human capacity to imagine – despite the pageantry fluff of it – a better world instead of a better gadget, a better airplane or a better party drug?
Imagine has struck so many chords in its timeless genius – from a major airport named after it to being quoted in the United States Supreme Court – precisely because it bespeaks our incredible collective capacity for change, for betterment, for imagination.
May 2010 be the year in which we really begin to Imagine.
