If there’s an area of life I’ve neglected, it’s music. Music, like reading, exercising, learning new skills, nurturing friendships, takes time.
It isn’t that I don’t have time. It’s more that I often squander it, unheeding Thoreau’s maxim, “Time is the stream I go fishing in.”
It wasn’t always this way. When I was young, I took a transistor radio nightly to bed, solaced by music into deep slumber.
Like my daily quest to learn Italian, I want to be more fluent in music’s idiom. I still don’t know how to listen to classical music with understanding.
I’ve been told Brahms helps you relax, sleep better. I need him for when I awake to night’s stillness, the indifferent stars, my mind ablaze with anxious thoughts.
Jazz, with its pulsating, sensual immediacy, its impromptu genius, I like, but don’t listen to enough.
The same with the vast tapestries of other music.
I can’t sum up what I’ve lost through my disconnect.
Musicians themselves can be great company, fellow pilgrims in life’s journey.
Until today, I hadn’t known that the eclectic David Bowie kept a list of his 100 favorite books. I’ve gone over that list. Oh, my god! These books, none of them airport reads, should be on everyone’s lists. They’re now on mine.
There are others like him, musical geniuses who have wrestled with life’s vagaries, the meaning of it all, how to live it fully, its sorrows and its griefs.
There’s Patti Smith, Rimbaud and Baudelaire enthusiast, Gifford Series lecturer at Yale, recipient of France’s Legion d’Honneur.
Joni Mitchell, lover of Yeats, Rilke, and the modernists poets.
Sting, who studied English literature, devotee of Shakespeare, philosophy and political theory.
Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize for Literature.
Maggie Rogers, a new voice for me, her sultry songs guaranteed to shake your hips to their beat. Rogers took time out to learn life’s purpose, enrolling at Harvard Divinity School, earning her master’s. Like Bowie, she keeps a booklist, owns a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s To a Lighthouse—“The best thing I own.”
So many others: Cohen, Morrissey, Mingus, Baez. Others still.
Why should I be surprised? Musicians are artists engaging life; their music, poetry.
Like the psalmist’s harp, it touches the Soul.
rj
Brimmings: up from the well 