Copenhagen, beneath the long shadow of time
Dear Mr. Sinatra,
I have listened to your song “It Was a Very Good Year,” and I confess—I wept. Not the kind of weeping that pleases the sentimentalists or flatters the romantics, but the deeper, quieter kind—the kind that arises when one hears a man sing of life not as a celebration, but as an autopsy performed with a silk glove.
You sing of years as “vintage wine”—fine, aged, savored. And yet behind every lyric is a sigh. This is not nostalgia; it is resignation. The song begins with youth and ends in winter, as all songs must. But what strikes me most is not the inevitability of decline—it is the illusion that meaning can be harvested from pleasure, that the parade of lovers and seasons might add up to something more than passing time.
You, sir, are not crooning. You are confessing. You thought you were merely singing of girls in small towns and blue-blooded women on leafy lanes, but what you have revealed is the terrifying symmetry of life: its seductions, its grandeur, and finally, its slow vanishing into the dusk. The “very good years” are not triumphs—they are tombstones in a vineyard.
You have sung the melody of Either/Or: the aesthetic man, reflecting at last, asking whether the wine was ever enough. I urge you—do not be deceived by your own elegance. Beneath your tuxedo, a soul is asking what all this revelry was for. That question is not to be avoided. It is your truest note.
Yours in dread and velvet,
Søren Kierkegaard
(The man your song already anticipated—though you didn’t know it at the time)
Cinemorphosis 
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