Death, Taxes, and Mahler

Yesterday turned out to be the day for pulling together all of my financial records for the annual process of filling out the form used by my tax preparation service. Now that I keep all of my material online, this has become a matter of retrieval and sorting, no longer plagued by digging through draws of paper. Nevertheless, I have to remind myself each year that, in order to get it right, the whole affair usually takes longer than I estimate. So a gave myself a clear afternoon to get the job done.

These days working on a long task seems to be facilitated by putting on a long piece of music. Yesterday afternoon that turned out to be Gustav Mahler's ninth symphony. Given that this music is suffused with the inevitability of death, it seemed to provide the appropriate atmosphere for dealing with the inevitability of taxes.