In quiet stillness, truth speaks
ISSUE: 02/28/07 > opinion > in quiet stillness, truth speaks
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Senior writer Eric Detweiler is a senior English major. |
My earliest conscious memory: sitting in a car seat in the back of my mom’s Chevette, cruising the golden suburbs of New Jersey, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” on the radio and me thinking it was the most awesome song imaginable. I went on to spend most of my elementary school years spinning the soundtracks to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Animaniacs. That lasted until I discovered big band jazz around the beginning of junior high. I got to know Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington really well, although my familiarity with contemporary music remained essentially nonexistent.
Then I hit high school and discovered classic rock. I went to a Styx concert, begged my parents to get me an electric guitar, and bought Led Zeppelin albums by the sackful. This phase gave way to an infatuation with ‘90s alternative rock, music I managed to discover right around 2000. I went to a Sister Hazel concert, started appreciating acoustic guitar more, and bought Counting Crows albums by the sackful. Now I’m a senior at Belmont, and I’ve had four years to catch up with the rest of the world via college rock. Meanwhile, with the possible exception of the Animaniacs soundtrack, I maintain a serious appreciation for my musical past. So here I am, a 21-year-old guy whose music library is replete with albums by Harry Connick Jr., Rush, Barenaked Ladies and the Cardigans.
I assume two basic types of people are reading this article: those who just want to be able to walk from Wheeler to Hitch without overhearing a deconstruction of the latest release from a band they’ve never heard of, and those who still wonder whether I saw Styx with or without Dennis DeYoung (or having an internal dialogue about whether the Cardigans’ music has become too melancholy, or similarly trapped in any comparable musical musing). I’m trapped somewhere in between: I could talk about this stuff for days, yet I converted from music business to English at the end of my freshman year. Since then, I’ve faced the reality that knowing everything about music doesn’t require one to know much about anything else. I’ve had literature and philosophy surveys in which people I’m sure have spent hours debating pop country’s merits couldn’t come up with a single comment. I realize John Milton and Aristotle are harder to unpack than a lot of song lyrics (R.E.M.’s clearly excepted), but aren’t the conversations about the nature of God and morality that their works could lead to more important than whether or not Coldplay is a terrible band?
Perhaps I just sound like a pretentious English and philosophy student with an axe to grind, but my goal isn’t to condemn music and anyone who hasn’t read the Norton Anthology of American Literature from cover to cover. I’d be spitting on myself. My worry is that music becomes a diversion, an aesthetic anesthetic that makes it possible not to deal with some of the central questions of life. I fear a campus of prospective pop stars with no idea why they want to be pop stars (and money, fame, and “because I just love music” are not sufficient responses). And the same is possible for students of any subject, English and philosophy thoroughly included. The concern here is this: it’s possible to become an apparent authority on a great album in well under an hour. Take David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust”: 38 minutes and 21 seconds. Then take a “classic” book. Not Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, or Don Quixote. Let’s go with something relatively short, say, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Even if you read at the relatively swift pace of one page per minute, you’ve got a four-hour commitment on your hands. And after the reading is done, there remain questions without immediate answers, questions to consume years, and I worry that music is an escape from confrontation with such inquiries.
This is not to say that music isn’t meaningful, but there is much that is meaningful outside the realm of music. And I’m not offering a universal pat on the back to the printed word. Dan Brown is probably not the best place to turn in the search for truth. What I’m hoping for is a willingness to wonder and to ponder, whether that’s through books, dialogue, prayer, or just thinking. What I’m hoping for is that the pursuit of music does not become a way of evading the pursuit of truth.
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