On Thanksgiving Day I caught a holiday special on NPR. The
hour long show featured stories of Americans especially grateful for music. Each story had one or more narrator with
samplings of the music that inspired them. The stories and the music touched me, and I remembered the
words of the philosopher Nietzsche (himself a musician) who said: “Without
music, life would be a mistake.”
Most of the NPR stories revolved around love and death. There
were stories about music leading to romantic encounters that led to happy, enduring
love. Other stories told how music
can heal deep wounds that life inflicts on us. In one sad tale, a woman describes how she lost her true
love in a cruel, untimely fashion; yet, in the end, their shared love of music
saved her from despair, and in her ongoing love of music has come to feel she’s gone beyond the pains of
her loss. She lives, she seemed to
say, in a mental atmosphere beyond anything that death could do to her—thanks to
the subtle effect of music on her consciousness.
