Time is the ebook we fill with the story of our lives. All nice storytelling has the form of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we’d like this shelter, want a spot nonetheless sufficient and quiet sufficient to listen to the story of our changing into, the tune of life evolution encoded in our cells: “Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music,” wrote the pioneering marine biologist Ernest Everett Simply as he was revolutionizing our understanding of what makes life alive.

Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) affords an uncommonly insightful meditation on how music may help us befriend the elemental dimension of our lives in her 1941 masterwork Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (public library), which I maintain to be one of many previous century’s nice works of philosophy — her lyrical reckoning with artwork and survival lensed by means of three visits to Yugoslavia between the world wars, exploring what makes us and retains us human.

West recounts a painful second of political pressure at a restaurant desk, all of the sudden interrupted by a Mozart symphony flooding in from the radio field, making “an argument too refined and profound to be put into phrases” — an argument for the breadth of time, for the way it can maintain and heal our longings and losses. With the touching humility of acknowledging the constraints of 1’s present and craft, she writes:

Music can cope with greater than literature… Artwork covers not even a nook of life, solely a knot or two right here and there, far aside and with out relation to the sample. How might we hope that it might ever carry order and sweetness to the entire of that huge and intractable cloth, that sail flapping within the opposite winds of the universe? But the music had promised us, because it welled forth from the magic field within the wall over our heads, that each one ought to but be nicely with us, that someday our life needs to be as pretty as itself.

The best music affords one thing even higher than itself — an amelioration of essentially the most subterranean battle of human life: our anxiousness about time. West writes:

The most important works of Mozart… by no means rush, they’re by no means headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they elevate no mud… It’s, certainly, insufficient to name the means of making such an impact a mere technical machine. For it adjustments the content material of the work wherein it’s used, it presents a imaginative and prescient of the world the place man is not the harassed sufferer of time however accepts its self-discipline and establishes a concord with it. This isn’t a bit of factor, for our battle with time is without doubt one of the most distressing of our elementary conflicts, it holds us again from the achievement and comprehension that needs to be the justification of our life.

One morning, West follows a waterfall up the river to its supply throughout “a broad and good-looking valley,” towards a lake that splits into two streams linked by a dilapidated village nestled in flowering bushes. There, she encounters music wholly totally different from Mozart’s but simply as elemental, simply as a lot a benediction of time in its syncopation of urgency and silence:

From the latticed higher story of one of many homes that had been rotting amongst their lilacs there sounded a girl’s voice, a deep voice that was not the much less smart as a result of it was permeated with the data of enjoyment, singing a Bosnian tune, filled with weariness at some stunning factor not completely achieved… Later, standing on a bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the inexperienced weeds on the piers, we heard one other such voice… pressing in its want to carry out magnificence from the throat, pressing to state an issue in music. Each these ladies made beautiful, thrilling use of a sure function peculiar to those Balkan songs. Between every musical sentence there’s a lengthy, lengthy pause. It’s as if the speaker put her level, after which the universe confronted her with its silence, with the fact she needs to change by proving her level. Are you fairly positive, it asks, that you’re proper?

That could be what we are able to be taught from music, what it means to have a harmonious relationship with time — coaching the thoughts to be unhurried, to halt the push of certainty simply sufficient to stay curious, to press an ear to the silence of the universe and pay attention for the clear sound of who and what we’re.