SOUNDS
I have been reading a book, The Immense World, which describes the way animals, including us, each sense the world in a different way. Some are guided by smell and have weak touch, some have acute hearing but weak or no eyesight. The point of the book is that we each perceive the world in a different way which results in all animals living in different worlds.
I went with Susie to the last concert last night of the Carolina Chamber Series on the WWC campus. It was all Schubert. A violinist play three of Schbert‘s songs with piano accompaniment. They were hauntingly beautiful. Schubert died at 31 but in his short life wrote hundreds of songs as well as many chamber pieces.
What I wondered then and still wonder is where these songs came from one after another. There must have been something in Schubert’s hearing, the sounds he heard and the effect on him that was intensely pleasing to him. He wrote these songs down and then the violinist was equally touched and through him I was touched. But why? Other animals would perhaps not even hear these sounds or if they did, would not be touched in any way. Other animals communicate with sounds that we, as humans, cannot even hear. Why do the sounds we hear touch us so deeply emotionally?
Hearing picks up sound waves which through a complicated process go to neurons in the brain. These are simply sound waves. But these particular sound waves touch us in an intensely emotional way. Why? And why did they touch Schubert so much more intensely than they touch me?
It is questions like this, which I am incapable of answering, which I don’t even want to answer, that drive me nuts.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 