{"id":15556,"date":"2014-12-24T13:25:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T18:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=15556"},"modified":"2014-12-24T13:25:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-24T18:25:58","slug":"how-can-we-be-so-unhappy-when-we-have-such-beautiful-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=15556","title":{"rendered":"How can we be so unhappy, when we have such beautiful dreams?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I mark the sad possing of the great Joe Cocker with a link to my favorite of all his recordings, Jimmy Webb&#8217;s classic song <a href=https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=SW9O77Eocmo target=1>&#8220;The Moon is a Harsh Mistress&#8221;<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some of you will also recognize this as the title of a great novel by Robert Heinlein.  The Heinlein story and the Webb song are, on their face, very different. What they share is a sense of the difference between the ideal reality we wish for, and the harsh reality that is.<\/p>\n<p>This mournful longing for something better that seems to elude our grasp, is a theme that runs through so many songs. You can hear it in Judy Garland&#8217;s rendition of the Arlen\/Harberg song &#8220;Somewhere over the Rainbow&#8221;, in Tom Waits&#8217; &#8220;Time&#8221;, in so many of the songs of Leonard Cohen.<\/p>\n<p>They all seek the answer to the same question &#8212; a question we all ask ourselves from time to time:  How can we be so unhappy, when we have such beautiful dreams?<\/p>\n<p>But nobody ever did it better than Joe Cocker, singing this immortal Jimmy Webb tune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I mark the sad possing of the great Joe Cocker with a link to my favorite of all his recordings, Jimmy Webb&#8217;s classic song &#8220;The Moon is a Harsh Mistress&#8221;. Some of you will also recognize this as the title of a great novel by Robert Heinlein. The Heinlein story and the Webb song are, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=15556\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;How can we be so unhappy, when we have such beautiful dreams?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15556"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15557,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15556\/revisions\/15557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}