Time is the book we fill with the story of our life. All good storytelling has a musical dimension. All music is a refuge in time. In these lives plagued by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, we need a place quiet enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our being, the song of evolution found in our cells: “Life is a wonderful thing of time, like music,” wrote the pioneering marine biologist Ernest Everett Just as he was changing our understanding of what makes life alive.
Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) offers an unusually insightful meditation on how music can help us befriend an important aspect of our lives in her 1941 masterpiece. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (public library), which I hold to be one of the greatest works of philosophy of the last century – his eloquent account of survival is reflected in three visits to Yugoslavia between the world wars, exploring what makes us human.
West narrates a painful moment of political disagreement at the dining table, suddenly interrupted by a Mozart symphony that entered the radio box, making “an argument so subtle and deep that it cannot be put into words” – an argument about the scope of time, about how it can hold and heal our desires and losses. With the touching humility of acknowledging the limitations of man's gift and craft, he writes:
Music can deal with more than books… Art does not cover even a corner of life, only one or two knots here and there, at a distance and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to all that great and immovable fabric, a sail flapping against the winds of the universe? However, the music had promised us, as it came out of the magic box on the wall above our heads, that everything would be fine, that one day our life should be as good as it is.
The greatest music offers something even greater than itself – the development of the underground struggle of human life: our anxiety over time. West writes:
Mozart's great works… never rush, never fall or helter-skelter, never splash mud, never raise dust… It's not really enough to call the means of producing this effect a technical device. Because it changes the content of the work in which it is used, it presents a world view where a person is no longer a tortured victim of time but accepts its discipline and makes a compromise with it. This is not a small thing, because our struggle with time is one of our most important conflicts, it takes us back to the achievement and understanding that should be the reason for our life.
One morning, West follows a waterfall upstream to its source through a “wide and picturesque valley,” toward a lake that divides into two streams connected by a dilapidated village surrounded by flowering trees. There, he encounters music that is completely different from Mozart's but fundamental, and the blessing of time in its harmony of urgency and silence:
From the fertile top floor of one of the decaying houses among the lilacs, a woman's voice was heard, a deep voice that was not so wise because it was full of the knowledge of joy, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness because of some good thing that was not done well… Later, standing on the bridge, looking at the clear blue water like a voice, we heard the voice from her green mouth… the desire to take the beauty out of the throat, the urgency to say problem in music. Both of these women used in a fun, exciting way a certain characteristic that is not common in these Balkan songs. Between each musical phrase there is a long, long pause. It is as if the speaker is making his point, then the whole world confronts him with its silence, and the truth he wants to change by proving his point. Are you sure, it asks, that you are right?
That may be what we can learn from music, what it means to have a harmonious relationship with time – to train the mind not to rush, to stop the rush of conviction enough to remain curious, to press an ear to the silence of the universe and listen to the clear sound of who and what we are.
