Lately I've been re-reading one of my favorite books: On Love by José Ortega y Gasset. I've long found Ortega's essays to be the most insightful analysis ever written regarding matters of the heart (and, with some reflection on the reader's part, by extension the love and creation of art). Ortega holds that the choices you make in the people you love and the artworks you treasure are deeply intertwined with your underlying vision of what matters in life, which he calls metaphysical sentiment. Just as Yeats wondered how we can know the dancer from the dance, Ortega wonders how we can know the singer from the song or the lover from the love or the thinker from the thoughts: for instance, in the context of talking about the philosophic conclusions of Stendhal and of Pío Baroja, he observes that "in the manner of songs they tell a truth, not about things, but about the singer."
Having recently given a little concert, I was struck yet again by Ortega's observations. My feeling about musical performance is that it should be a barely controlled cauldron of emotion lit by a sacred fire of passionate presence. At the least, this is how I approach my own performances, whether I'm singing "All Along the Watchtower" or "St. James Infirmary" or one of my own compositions. If I'm not putting my entire soul into the music, why am I playing and singing in the first place? The same goes for my attitude to love and friendship: the point is to engage in freehearted giving, not some coldhearted calculation of benefits and costs. Yes, this requires some form of courage in the face of vulnerability and the inevitability of loss, but if I'm not living to the hilt why am I living in the first place? When I resided in New York City back in college, a fortune cookie I opened at some Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side said it perfectly: "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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