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mocks the Holocaust. Jewish students must hide their religion in school. The far right, far left, and the Arabs have found a common enemy in us. Our synagogues are desecrated and our shops are burned. I don’t have to tell you that my accountant son-inlaw is Orthodox. He’s spat upon in the street. You know what happened to my parents, and I know what happened to yours.”
anti semitism increasing
“Music,” he told them, countering their education and the ethos of his country, his continent, and the century, “is not made by man. If you know this and surrender to it you’ll allow its deeper powers to run through you. It’s all a question of opening the gates. Of risking your disappearance and accepting it.
music
you arrive at that state you’ll be effortlessly propelled, seized, and possessed by the music. Paradoxically, your timing will be perfect as time ceases to exist. All matter, and even we, are a construction of energy, and all energy is pulse and proportion. Within the most stolid block of granite, electrons have never ceased to circle and speed. Perhaps if you could see them they’d look like stars. Whether or not they pulse with light, they are animate. In us, animation is body and soul. We move, we sense, we see, all by the organization of irrepressible primal pulses. When music is great,
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great music
“For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good.
what is beauty
“Quite simply, and make of it what you will: music is the voice of God.” They had to reject this, or at least they thought
music is the voice of God
The language and syntax of music, like the language and syntax of all art, is as imperfect as our bodies. And its relation to mortality is the same as our own. Though the music of language can do this almost as well, nothing expresses so closely human sorrow, joy, and love – in its rhythms, its changes of tone, and changes of tempo – as music. People say God didn’t speak directly
language of music
