1. Hildegard believed music was a clear path to transcendence, and if she had access to electronic synthesizers in her day, she'd surely use one in her anchorage: "Every Nun Needs a Synthi"
2. There's a delighful collection of her compositions available on CD, called Canticles of Ecstasy
3. A collection of Hildegard's lyrics, in Latin with English translations:

   "O path of strength that enters all places in the high places and in the plains, and in all the depths you call and unify all.
   
   From you the clouds/smoke flows, the ether files, stones/jewels have/given their feeling/moods/qualities water streams shown their way. (given their course) and earth made green and fresh." -- O Ignis Spiritus, translated by Rupert Chapelle

   Hmm. Erich von Daniken would have likely claimed that passage was Hildegard's prescient vision of overclocked water-cooled computer CPU's.
4. Fordham University's informative introduction to the life and works of Hildegard von Bingen
5. Last year, while looking through an old dusty box of cassette tapes someone at work was discarding, I found a small (2" x 4") framed minature painting of Hildegard von Bingen. Strange coincidence, I think...

First we stopped about 12 miles short of Brno in the town of Slavkov u Brna, better known to historians as Austerlitz. In December of 1805, between Austerlitz and Brno, Napoleon's army met the combined forces of Russia's Tsar Alexander and the Austrian Emperor Francis. Twenty-thousand soldiers were killed.

This seems to me, now, highly relevant to the opening of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the author explains the idea of eternal return, a notion explored by Nietzsche. Eternal return posits that every occurrence recurs an infinite number of times. (Time is infinite, but there are only a finite number of events, so eventually anything that happens will happen again.) If this "mad myth" is true, Kundera suggests, everything we do matters. If it's not true, then even the most horrific events are ephemeral and thus forgivable. Nothing matters. [keep reading]

"That fresh smell of baking buns: the mouth waters when one inhales the pleasant smell of buns either in the kitchen or outside the house and one immediately feels like tasting them. Everybody prefers these while taking coffee or tea either in the morning or in the evening. Some use them along with banana during nights. [!] People of all classes and ages consume buns. Their preparation is easy and economical. These ingredients are eggless and baked in quick time and people of any food habit can enjoy the taste."

"Now, instead of being a second-rate city with an overpaid baseball team, antiquated infrastructure, intractable institutional racism, lousy museum, awful traffic, worsening pollution, and crunk, Atlanta ... has an Ikea." [via MonkeySARS]