I remember reading decades ago a passage in some book where the author claimed that in response to the traumatic news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he went to his piano and started playing Bach. He explained there was something spiritual in Bach’s solo keyboard music which offered him profound solace in moments of sadness and loss.
That anecdote stayed with me for some reason. A few moments of reading many years ago struck a chord. It resonates to this day.
I get it.
I remember finding a used copy of the full Well Tempered Clavier, Book I while rummaging through the bargain bin of compact disks back when I was 22-years old. I listened to it almost non-stop for months. Then I got Keith Jarrett’s Book II. I liked it and listened to Book Ii even more than the Book I.
A good chunk of my twenties and early thirties was spent listening to such music. Hour after hour after hour. I would spend an entire Saturday morning and afternoon enraptured..
Then I got seriously into my career. Next, I got married and had two daughters. I never stopped listening to classical music, and one of the major reasons I married my wife is that she too knows and loves classical music. Our first date together was at Royce Hall at UCLA listening to Hillary Hahn play a Mozart violin concerto; Our second date was at the beautiful Clark Library listening to some ugly music by Max Bruch. But that was courtship. Later Maria and I became so busy in building our adult lives together that there was little time for ourselves. We were oriented towards engaging the outside world of work and the needs of babies and then small children. Buying a house and starting a family. It was a demanding time of life. We were almost always busy, if not overwhelmed.
Perhaps this is best shown back in 2011 when I taught multiple demanding Advanced Placement high school classes in my day job, had a three-year old and a newborn baby at home, a wife who also had a full-time teaching job, and I also had a second job teaching grad school classes at night. Whew! I get tired just thinking about it.
Had I been too busy to attune my ear — or my soul? — to the quiet interiority of J.S.Bach? Was the hurlyburly of the workaday world a sort of violence against my sense of inner peace? Did I lose a semblance of self?
Happily, I am in a different stage of life now. And I can make a conscious decision to make a corrective choice to live a slower, more deliberate and introspective lifestyle. For example, last night I sat on the couch alone and listened to 49 minutes of the 1:49:00 of Bach Well Tempered Clavier, Book I. It took my full concentration, but then I ran out of time. Maybe in a day or two I can listen to the full almost two hours. I can find the free time. Or I can make the time available.
There is always time when something is important.
To be quiet. To move inward in meditation and stillness. To refuse to lose oneself to the hive mind of communal gossip, constant worry, incessant conflict — backbiting and persiflage — social media, news updates, and collective anxiety — Americans glued to their phones reading about Donald Trump or the COVID-19 virus. That shit will work it’s way out one way or another.
Time to tend to my inner life. And my wife and two daughters.
And get some solid reading and writing done, and some quality tennis matches and hikes in the hills. Family time. And personal time. Listen to The French and English Suites. The whole Anna Magdalena Notebook.
Solitude. Maybe the reason I do much less listening to music like The Goldberg Variations is because I have much less solitude than I did in my twenties and early thirties. Serious reading of intense literature or listening to classical music requires quiet uninterrupted stretches of time by oneself.
But with the county set to semi-shut down over the “Coronavirus” outbreak, I suddenly find myself with free time.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
So let it begin now.
“Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamor of silence.”
Rabindranath Tagore
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal
“There’s too much music everywhere. It’s horrible stuff, the most noise conveying the least information. Kids today are violent because they have no inner life; they have no inner life because they have no thoughts; they have no thoughts because they know no words; they know no words because they never speak; and they never speak because the music’s too loud.”
Quentin Crisp
“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.”
Nicholas Sparks, “The Notebook“
“When the turbulence of distracting thoughts subside and our mind becomes still, a deep happiness and contentment naturally arises from within.”
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
