Thursday, January 7, 2010

the end (is the beginning...)


There are a number of reasons for why "Abbey Road" is the cover of this post, the first of this new year. For one thing, I have come to think of it as my favourite Beatles album. Apart from the myths and legends connected to Rock's most famous album cover, it contains some of my favourite songs plus the coolest medley of short melodic poems ever written (all the tracks from the "Sun King" to the end of the album are a continuous piece of McCartney's genius). For another thing, I recently read that "Abbey Road", although released prior to "Let it be", was actually recorded after it, thus it constitutes the last Beatles album. It moreover finishes off with a glorious "The End"*, a sort of coda of less than two and a half minutes, which at the same time conveys the message of closure and bids farewell.

Such an end of ends, the last track of the last album cannot but remind me the last week of the last of the weights I had to carry (and "Carry that Weight" is not curiously Abbey Road's next to last track) over the past year. My military service will soon be over and I cannot but look back at these last nine months without a sigh of relief. 2009 was the year of great changes, sudden adaptations and an irreplaceable loss. In all I am glad it's over. In some very different way, so must have been the Beatles about Abbey Road.

Still, all the changes that the last year brought about, the closure in many aspects of my life and completing the one last thing that I really HAD to do, somehow mark more of a beginning than an end. I am soon to be starting a new life, something I am trying for the first time, something for which I have been waiting for too long, something that is probably the reason behind all these changes.
I am starting a common life with someone so special, for whom I can only think of the last, the ultimate line of the Beatles' lyrics.

"...And in the end, the love we take, is equal to the love we make."

See that there is a full stop, right there.



*the album's last track, "Her Majesty's" is a mere joke and should not count