A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music

“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.”

“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful — the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of con...