MOONLIGHT IN THE GLOOMY NIGHT OF LIFE
It calls in my spirits, composes my thoughts, delights my ear, recreates my mind, and so not only fits me after an unsettling moment, but fills my heart, in the present, with pure and useful thoughts, so that when the music sounds the sweetest in my ears, truth commonly flows the clearest into my mind. There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say it is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of phenomena, a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual and yet requiring rhythm, material and yet independent of space. It can noble hints impart, engender fury, kindle love, with unsuspected eloquence can move and manage all of me with secret art. I find it to be the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. I first learn to love jazz when I lived in Chicago, I lived on the south side, across from a jazz club. Sometimes I would leave my windows open and from it issue the airs of a piano player, he played so smooth it was like blue strains, serpentines of music unrolling in the dark shadows, curling around my wrist and neck as I sat there listening. Then joined by the band that were playing out their maplesugar hearts, as to be tapping it from four-hundred-year-old trees and letting it run down the trunk, wasting it because they didn’t have a bucket to hold it and didn’t want one either. They just wanted to let it run slow if it wished, or fast, but a free run down trees, bursting to give it up, oh, so silky sweet the sounds. Once admitted to the soul becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wonders perturbedly through the hall and galleries of my memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living, as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air. It washes away from my soul the dust of everyday life. It is the only sensual gratification in which I may indulge to excess without injury to my moral or religious feelings. I love music for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. The highest graces of music flow from the feelings of the heart. It disciplines me, it is a mistress of order and good manners, she makes me milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable than I would ordinarily be. It moves me and I know not why, I feel the tears, but I cannot trace their source. Is it a language of some other state, born of its memory? For what can wake the soul’s strong instinct of another world like music. It has been my playmate, my lover, my crying towel at times. In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul, it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps, the tones are companion of his dreams, the world in which he lives, the speech of angels.