What's that song and can it be sung?

Regarding Brandeis and the Lydian String Quartet, I have just signed my name to an open letter to my alma mater:

Sonya Taaffe, B.A./M.A. Classical Studies '03. The high-handed, short-sighted demolition of the music department would have been unthinkable to me during my time at Brandeis, when I specifically chose the university for the strength of the arts in its liberal arts, even over an acceptance to NEC, and was rewarded with an undergraduate experience in which music—studied, performed, appreciated—played as vivid and enduring a part as Greek lyric poetry. I am in accordance with the general opinion that enrollment in a liberal arts university is not improved by diminishing the quality and diversity of its arts and that the artistry of the Lydians is incalculable beyond budget cuts. The quartet is a treasure, not an expense. I hope to hear soon that the university has recalculated its values.

As I have also just written elsewhere, I hope the court of public and professional opinion falls in on the university's head just as hard as when it tried to sell off the Rose Art Museum. It makes me furious. I attended a school: what does it want to make itself instead, an illusion? I know finances are real. I know the singing of strings and sounding wood and breath and fingers has got just as much reality. I wrote doikayt first.

Outside is a land and I'll walk it when I'm certain

Talking with spatch about the frankly exhausting prospect of pulling our democracy through this election only to have to pull it through another election all over again in four years, which is of course preferable to the alternative, launched me onto thinking about how all the fantasy I read as a child did warn me this would happen. None of the touchstones of my childhood had a done-and-dusted, tidy conclusion to the war of light and dark. If anything, they emphasized the opposite:

"Evil conquered?" said Gwydion. "You have learned much, but learn this last and hardest of lessons. You have conquered only the enchantments of evil. That was the easiest of your tasks, only a beginning, not an ending. Do you believe evil itself to be so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them. Against these even a flaming sword cannot prevail, but only that portion of good in all men's hearts whose flame can never be quenched."
—Lloyd Alexander, The High King (1968)

"For remember," he said, "that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world . . . And the world will still be imperfect, because men are imperfect. Good men will still be killed by bad, or sometimes by other good men, and there will still be pain and disease and famine, anger and hate. But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better."
—Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree (1977)

"Then you will go back to the world from which you came," he said, "and it will be as if you had never left. You will each go back to grief and loss, but you will have the strength to survive them, for echoing at the back of your minds —not quite seen or heard, not quite apprehended—will be all those things that you have learned on your journey here. Like the leaves on the trees each year, you will grow and change. And indeed, you may never find wisdom or contentment in that world into which you were born—but you may if you are lucky see a light that blazes far more brightly, even though it must in the end burn itself out."
—Susan Cooper, Seaward (1983)

It spoke to her, not with words but as if she were thinking to herself. My shadows are still abroad in the world. As I have done evil, for some time yet they still shall. Stop them. Stop me.
We will. Always.
Then the worlds are saved, as long as you save them all over again, every day.
—Diane Duane, High Wizardry (1990)

Over and over, I found this theme of the imperfect world, the constant saving, not even bleakly, but factually. It would be nice to imagine that the ending of Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) unbinds the valley from the wheel of the myth on which it has been fixed ever since it was immemorially forced into the pattern of Blodeuwedd, but it went without saying for child-reader me that the story would fall in time on the next generation, who would have to make up their minds to owl or flowers, and so on until perhaps at last the valley was so changed with time that it could no longer act as a reservoir of story and perhaps not even then. Even Tolkien, who makes less a of a speech about it, returns his painfully victorious characters to the Scouring of the Shire, and taking ship for the Grey Havens, and the explicit shift of responsibility from the numinous into the workaday:

"I am with you at present," said Gandalf, "but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you."
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (1955)

I had wanted to write, before the election, about two reasonably different movies which put me in mind of one or all of these passages, but it has been a stupidly hammering year on the heels of other stupidly hammering years and neither of them has yet been possible, but the entire point here is that the work of the world doesn't go out of style. I don't know where anybody gets the idea of an ultimate victory unless they've got their head up the Rapture or something. I never did feel betrayed by C. S. Lewis, but I still don't believe in The Last Battle (1956).