Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Hovhaness

A casual “No, no” that suddenly detonates into catastrophe: Hovhaness begins like someone batting away a piece of gossip, then pivots to a date-stamped wound. The offhand cadence is the point. It mimics the way genocide survives in diaspora conversation, not as an abstract historical lesson but as a fact that interrupts ordinary speech. The listener expects a tidy anecdote about acquaintance; instead they get an unprocessed trauma with a year attached.

“Lost his mind around 1917” is both blunt and oddly imprecise. Hovhaness doesn’t medicalize or dramatize; he offers madness as an understandable consequence, a social shorthand for a psyche overwhelmed by atrocity. That “around” signals the limits of memory and the way trauma resists clean chronology. Yet “1917” also anchors the remark in the long shadow of the Armenian Genocide (1915-23), when news, displacement, and survivor testimony rippled through Armenian communities well beyond the killing fields. The tragedy isn’t background; it’s causation.

Hovhaness, an Armenian-American composer whose work often strains toward the spiritual and the mournful, isn’t doing program notes here. He’s revealing a cultural logic: artistic lineage and personal history are inseparable from collective violence. The subtext reads like a quiet rebuke to audiences who want art detached from politics, or biography reduced to charming trivia. Even in denial (“I didn’t know him”), the line confesses intimacy with the event itself. The Armenians are the subject that can’t be kept out of the room.