Orfeo

by Richard Powers

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music’s exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

“Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.”

Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.

There’s joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you’re equal to it.

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

It’s astonishing, he said. What is? The things that happen down there. I have no idea what you’re talking about. He couldn’t begin to tell her. Life. Four billion years of chance had written a score of inconceivable intricacy into every living cell. And every cell was a variation on that same first theme, splitting and copying itself without end through the world. All those sequences, gigabits long, were just waiting to be auditioned, transcribed, arranged, tinkered with, added to by the same brains that those scores assembled. A person could work in such a medium—wild forms and fresh sonorities. Tunes for forever, for no one.

So, what are you saying? That this was all some kind of vicarious fantasy? The road not taken? In a way. I was . . . I was trying . . . Oh, shit. Her hand rose and her eyes widened. You were composing. In DNA? It did sound ludicrous. But what was music, ever, except pure play?

There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?