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Re: Here's a 'must read' article... one that makes me somewhat sad...

Posted by SLL (A) on April 11, 2007 at 07:04:11

In Reply to: Here's a 'must read' article... one that makes me somewhat sad... posted by Enchantment1.6s on April 8, 2007 at 15:52:13:

A number of respondents have "poo-pooed" the entire "experiment" as not "valid" because the conditions were not ideal for the enjoyment of beauty, but to me, that completely misses the point. I'm reminded of the great utilitarian, John Stuart Mill, who described in his "Autobiography" how, after a nervous breakdown, he found solace in the poetry of Wordsworth. But if you read this section of his "Autobiography" carefully, what you will see is that his approach to adding emotion to his stunted life was like putting a bandaid on a serious wound. Or, to quote my own paper on this, it's like coming home at the end of a long, hard day in the world and "popping open an ice cold can of Wordsworth" to enjoy in your Lay-z-boy in front of the tube. The point is that this approach to resolving the divide between reason and emotion, the material world and the inner world, is an artifice, and I would argue ultimately unfulfilling. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of the Romantic movement in literature.

My point is that the notion of saving the enjoyment of beauty only to those times and places where it's convenient for us (e.g., when the lights are dimmed in our dedicated music rooms or in our high-priced music halls) is, to me, as pathetic as Mills' Wordsworth bandaid.

I was at that metro stop the morning Joshua Bell played the violin. From approximately 100 feet away, down an escalator in a cavernous space, I knew that what I was hearing was beautiful. I actually took out a single dollar bill before I even got on the escalator, well before I could see the artist, because I appreciated the beauty that I was hearing. But I am disappointed in myself for not welcoming this extraordinary opportunity more fully into my life that morning. I gave the artist a dollar, but I didn't stop. I am fairly ignorant with respect to classical music, so I don't know if I'm capable of appreciating the difference between a Joshua Bell playing a Strad, and a good student from George Mason University playing a new $3000 violin bought from Guitar Center, or wherever it is one buys a violin. But my sadness is that I missed an opportunity I may never have again in my lifetime, an opportunity to enrich my life experience, whether or not I ever subsequently discovered that it was Joshua Bell and a Stradivarius. So I am a little sad, but also chastened -- I hope to have re-learned an important lesson about being more open to these moments, whenever they may occur.

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