Are you feeling despairing of our wretched human condition?
Watch this, and your heart will soar.
You won’t believe the full-grown opera voice that comes out of this 9-year-old girl. She is Amira Willighagen, auditioning for Holland’s Got Talent by singing “O Mio Babbino Caro.”
For her amazing performance, little Amira was awarded a “Golden Ticket,” which allowed her to proceed straight to the Live Show.
She won the 2013 Holland’s Got Talent.
Amira’s first CD, entitled simply Amir, with the three arias she performed on Holland’s Got Talent, was released on March 31, 2014.
I am reminded of what the great 20th century American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) once wrote:
“This is man: For the most part a foul, wretched, abominable creature, a packet of decay,…a hater of his kind, a cheater, a scorner, a mocker, a reviler, a thing that kills and murders in a mob or in the dark, loud and full of brag surrounded by his fellows, but without the courage of a rat alone… This is man, who will…bow down in worship before charlatans, and let his poets die… Yes, this is man, and it is impossible to say the worst of him, for the record of his obscene existence, his baseness, lust, cruelty, and treachery, is illimitable…
Yet if the gods could come here to a desolate, deserted earth where only the ruin of man’s cities remained…a cry would burst out of their hearts… Behold his works:
He needed speech to ask for bread, and he had Christ! He needed songs to sing in battle, and he had Homer! He needed words to curse his enemies, and he had Dante, he had Voltaire, he had Swift! He needed cloth to cover up his hairless, puny flesh against the seasons, and he wove the robes of Solomon… He needed a temple to propitiate his God, and he made Chartres and Fountains Abbey!…
Plagues wasted him, and cruel wars destroyed his strongest sons, but fire, flood, and famine could not quench him…
So this is man, the worst and best of him, this frail and petty thing who lives his day and dies like all the other animals, and is forgotten. And yet, he is immortal, too. For both the good and evil that he does live after him.”
H/t FOTM’s Ken L.
~Eowyn
