On Music and Writing

A website I read almost every Sunday. Wise and inspired quotes and texts from immense writers on music, art and writing.


Today:

Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to Our Souls

“There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Extracts:

Huxley considers music’s singular capacity for expressing the inexpressible:

In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man’s most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life — it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.

But the most complete experience of all, the only one superior to music, is silence:

When the inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always and everywhere, the rest is silence.

In a different piece from the same collection, the uncommonly breathtaking title essay “Music at Night,” Huxley revisits the subject of humanity’s most powerful medium of expression:

Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines. There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warm living body of the night.

[…]

Suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate confidence (for I had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what music the machine would play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictusin Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis begins to trace patterns on the moonless sky.

Huxley exhales:

The Benedictus. Blessed and blessing, this music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound, it pours itself, stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising and falling, falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night in another mode of being, as an essence is the equivalent of the flowers, from which it is distilled.



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This inspired a quote from a text by Patti Smith:

“Blessedness is within us all,” Patti Smith wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, and it is the revelation of this blessedness that Huxley celebrates as music’s highest power:

There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness, of whose existence occasional accidents or providences (for me, this night is one of them) make us obscurely, or it may be intensely, but always fleetingly, alas, always only for a few brief moments aware. In the Benedictus Beethoven gives expression to this awareness of blessedness. His music is the equivalent of this Mediterranean night, or rather of the blessedness at the heart of the night, of the blessedness as it would be if it could be sifted clear of irrelevance and accident, refined and separated out into its quintessential purity.


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Read the whole article here:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/05/aldous-huxley-music-at-night/?mc_cid=8c122121c6&mc_eid=cd5a6845cc