Violins v. iPods

I just read this article.The opening graphs:

“HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.”

The violinist is Joshua Bell.

That probably doesn’t mean much to most, and only resonates with me because I listened to his recording of the Bruch concerto about fifty-five thousand times when I was dating my girlfriend from high-school. She was learning the first movement of the Bruch concerto and would routinely pop his recording in and sit, eyes closed, vicariously fingering the chords on her violin while I would watch transfixed, mouth open. It was without question the single sexiest thing I’d ever witnessed at that point in my life.

One of the first times she ever did this, after the movement was over, she looked up at me, crying, and said:

“I’ll never be this good.”

I nodded.

“But you get it, right? You get that this is incredible?”

I nodded.

It was. The Bruch is one of those pieces that has the ability to make you feel something. Its elegiac and melancholy and, in the hands of a master, the goddamn violin actually sounds like it’s crying. It’s not incredibly well-known, but whenever I hear it, I always catch myself listening and thinking back to those moments in her room, Joshua Bell blaring from cheap boom-box speakers.

And now I read that, for an hour, Joshua played in a Washington DC subway station masquerading as a busker. His take? Around $32.00. The article is one of the best I’ve read in a newspaper in quite some time. It’s a meditation on our capacity to recognize beauty without frames, without choosing when and where we will experience transcendence.

And at first, reading this, I fumed at the idiots who scurried on their way, oblivious to the man who had left me such an indelible memory. But then I looked to my left and saw my iPod, playing the same goddamn album I’ve listened to for the last 6 months. And I thought about my car, with its familiar catalogue of burned CD’s, and printed stories scattered across my back seat that I’ve been fine-tuning for the past three years…

I’m no better.

If I was in that station that day, I wouldn’t have even noticed him. I would have been listening to my iPod.

I’ve been obsessed lately with figuring out what this decade should be called. And I think that this story gets at something that I’ve been trying to put into words for a while:

We don’t allow things to touch us unless we choose to be touched. We plan ahead for transcendence. The amount of time we just listen and look and don’t seek is approaching nil.

And it gets to the point where the only thing I can remember are fake moments, like watching someone sympathetically fingering along to a virtuoso and then looking at me and saying that they could never be that good.

We live in “The Vicarious Oughts”. We’ve confused talent with effort and instead live through other people’s exploits to achieve our own epiphanies.