I usually don’t bother devoting an entire blog post to one video, but this one, which I came upon via Kottke, resonated (no pun intended) with me so much that I simply had to share it:

It’s a five-minute documentary about the oldest piano shop in Paris.  I am an unabashed devotee of all things France and piano, so the the premise alone, of course, was enough to lure me in, but nothing quite prepared me for the magic and melancholy of it all: an immaculate handwritten ledger, narrow dusty shelves of hammers and dampers, and the owner of the shop himself, unflinching in the absence of sentimentality required by his line of work (“I put off the actual kill until the last possible moment'”) even as he doodles sailboats bobbing on oceans.  (Surely there’s a novel to be written about this guy’s life.  Idea for NaNoWriMo 2012?  Oh, dear.) 

♪ Frédéric Chopin – Nocturne No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 9 No. 1: Larghetto

When he speaks of the Pleyel piano of the 1920s, I remember that Chopin composed his indelible music on just such an instrument, albeit of an earlier vintage.  I think about all that is lost to us and all that we try to salvage: sounds with no echo, a music that casts no shadow.