Don't start thinking about tomorrow

Serious matters demand our attention:

* Super Tuesday gives way to What-the-hell-just-happened Wednesday.

* The Tampa Tribune has published important new information on the drug flights.

* The far-right blogs have spread most outrageous lie ever told about John McCain. I'm no McCain fan, but a fib like this is beyond forgiveness.

* Recession is inevitable. Commercial properties will soon be in default. Krugman predicts a loss of 137,000 jobs next month. The financial services industry is shrinking faster than an ice cube in a stew-pot.

Much activity. Little hope.

And truth to tell, I can't focus on any of it unless I force myself.

This state of mind resists easy description. Fortunately, Garrison Keillor has found the words:

The American people are looking for change this year, and so am I, and yet my imagination is planted in the past. Is that sad or what? I wander through the museum and the art of 2007 strikes me as shallow and zany, and the modern art of the early 20th century -- Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, Chagall, Hopper -- seems noble and full of tenderness. A Chopin étude is a porcelain bowl holding powerful affections, and if someone sits at the piano and plays Chopin, the house is filled with images of beautiful women in lamplight looking out at fields of snow, children asleep on a pile of coats at a party, quiet husbands starved for love, the dignity of dogs, the taste of caviar and onion on toast, the pleasure of the forbidden kiss, the feeling of silk. I listen to Sarah Songwriter's lines about the boyfriend who disappointed her and wonder if she is getting enough exercise. I listen to Mahler's Fourth and it seems to contain the lives of everyone I ever knew.

Seems to, because it does. The Fourth is about childhood, and child-self we carry within us until death. After searching for ultimate truth over the course of two massive symphonies, Mahler ended up at Matthew 18:2-4.

As it happened, I listened to that symphony twice today, before reading Keillor's piece. (If you're in the market for a good recording, look for the names Szell, Reiner or Maazel.) The last movement of the Fourth is a song, with lyrics from a very old German folk poem about heaven as a child might imagine it. Most of the verses concern food: Heaven is where children don't starve.

A song like that tells you something about our past that you don't read in most history books.

And maybe it also says something about our future.