Let Me Say It Openly: We Are

One Day Some As Yet Unborn Scholar Will Recognize In The Clock The Machine That Has Tamed The Wilds.

But The Truth, He Knows, Is Otherwise. His Pleasure In Living Has Been Snuffed Out. Like A Leaf On A Stream, Like A Puffball On A Breeze, He Has Begun To Float Towards His End. He Sees It Quite Clearly, And It Fills Him With (the Word Will Not Go Away) Despair. The Blood Of Life Is Leaving His Body And Despair Is Taking Its Place, Despair That Is Like A Gas, Odourless, Tasteless, Without Nourishment. You Breathe It In, Your Limbs Relax, You Cease To Care, Even At The Moment When The Steel Touches Your Throat.

Music Expresses Feeling, That Is To Say, Gives Shape And Habitation To Feeling, Not In Space But In Time. To The Extent That Music Has A History That Is More Than A History Of Its Formal Evolution, Our Feelings Must Have A History Too. Perhaps Certain Qualities Of Feeling That Found Expression In Music Can Be Recorded By Being Notated On Paper, Have Become So Remote That We Can No Longer Inhabit Them As Feelings, Can Get A Grasp Of Them Only After Long Training In The History And Philosophy Of Music, The Philosophical History Of Music, The History Of Music As A History Of The Feeling Soul.

I Want To Find A Way Of Speaking To Fellow Human Beings That Will Be Cool Rather Than Heated, Philosophical Rather Than Polemical, That Will Bring Enlightenment Rather Than Seeking To Divide Us Into The Righteous And The Sinners, The Saved And The Damned, The Sheep And The Goats.

It Gets Harder All The Time, Bev Shaw Once Said. Harder, Yet Easier. One Gets Used To Things Getting Harder; One Ceases To Be Surprised That What Used To Be Hard As Hard Can Be Grows Harder Yet.