If you know me, you know I don’t exactly have a sunny, optimistic outlook on life. I’m a “glass half empty, and UGH, I suppose I’m going to have to wash it, so what else is new” kind of person. That’s just who I am.
But it doesn’t go all the way down. Way down at the bottom of my heart, underneath many, many layers of grousing and complaining, there is an unshakeable, bedrock belief that everything is going to turn out okay.
Everything!
EVERYTHING.
Maybe not right now, maybe not even during my lifetime, maybe not until the whole world had burned, perished, and wafted away, but eventually. It will work out.
I attribute this belief to Bach.
Maybe not right now, maybe not even during my lifetime, maybe not until the whole world has burned, perished, and wafted away, but eventually. It will work out.I attribute this belief to Bach.
When I was little, my father used to play the piano in the alcove underneath my bedroom. He wasn’t a great pianist, but he was persistent, and the music itself spoke for itself. I could hear the faltering notes and chords filtering up through the floorboards, sometimes with certainty, sometimes with longing. Many nights, that is how I fell asleep.
The thing about Bach is that everything does come out all right in the end, but he goes to some wild places before he gets there. I’m not musically educated enough to identify the technical maneuvers and intrigues that go on in his many different kinds of music, but if you listen attentively, you will hear weird, unsettling shifts in harmony, unexpected turns, strange
juxtapositions, incredibly fraught escalations of tension, and even passages verge on cacophony.
AND THEN IT ALL WORKS OUT. More than that: It works out in a way that shows you how everything all fit together all along, from the very first note, even though it seemed random or chaotic when it was passing by. It all works out in the end, and it always produces (and always was, even in the production of it) something so beautiful, so cheering, so full of love and passion and intelligence in its resolution, that when I hear it, it changes me. Bach’s music does what chiropractors or chakra adjusters claim to do: It realigns something deep inside me, and sets it right again. Sometimes it only lasts for a few minutes, but it always happens. God bless Bach.
Not everybody feels this way about Bach. I believe (though I don’t really understand) that some people find him too mathematical or mechanical or even stuffy, and he just doesn’t do much for them. Or some people don’t even care deeply about any kind of music, classical or otherwise. That’s (I say with great effort and self-control) okay. The thing to do … Read the rest of my latest for The Pillar. (This is subscriber content.)
