The Ageless Story

"The Ageless Story" is, as you might have guessed, the story of Jesus. Oddly enough, just the story of Mary's conception and birth, and Jesus's birth and childhood and the fact that he grew up. Conveniently leaving out the part about the gruesome death.

It begins with a letter to the author's goddaughter, who the book is dedicated to, talking about how Gregorian music is the best music and newer music is bad because it's not as spiritual and the Renaissance was terrible because Greeks worshiped the body and art became humanistic instead of spiritual, and the art before that was all good and looked Heavenly and pure, but the art after that just looks like actual people do. "Dang that perspective! It's ruining our children!"

It talks about the legend of Saint Anne, and then the Gospel according to Saint Luke. This is all a wall of text. This is followed by Gregorian music in Gregorian notation, with the lyrics all in Latin and a translation into English. She says in the introduction that "It hasn't any chords and the words are very important. They can't be translated because translation makes the words get out of place." Oddly, as she describes in the introduction letter, she chose to accompany the Gregorian music with art looking like the world where her goddaughter grew up. So Mary's parents live in a house and have a bed which is from 1939. So they have windows with glass and framing in them, and the house has columns on the porch, and little hearts on the shutters and the door, because it's supposed to actually depict the area of the country where the goddaughter lived, possibly Connecticut. This is strange since it was so important to her to extol the virtues of art prior to the Renaissance specifically because the Renaissance made everything look realistic rather than holy. Then she turns around and does the exact thing she was railing against. But I seriously doubt that, as she says, "The barn that Jesus was born in would look like a cave to us." I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cave, but was a structure built by humans. People living in the time and culture of Jesus were not living in caves. Ugh.