Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to
Our Souls
“There
is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the
heart of things, a mysterious blessedness.”
“Without
music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche proclaimed in
1889. But although a great many beloved writers
have extolled the
power of music with varying degrees of Nietzsche’s
bombast, no one has captured its singular enchantment more beautifully than Aldous
Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963). In his mid-thirties — just
before the publication of Brave New World catapulted him into
literary celebrity and a quarter century before his insightful writings about
art and artists and his transcendent
experience with hallucinogenic drugs—
Huxley came to contemplate the mysterious transcendence at the heart of this
most spiritually resonant of the arts. His meditations were eventually
published as the 1931 treasure Music
at Night and Other Essays .
In a
magnificent essay titled “The Rest Is Silence” — which inspired the title of
Alex Ross’s modern masterwork The Rest Is
Noise — Huxley writes:
From pure sensation to the intuition of
beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all
the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are
most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest
is always and everywhere silence.
After silence that which comes nearest to
expressing the inexpressible is music.
In a
parenthetical observation that calls to mind Susan Sontag on the aesthetics
of silence, Huxley adds:
Silence is an integral part of all good
music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s
music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems
so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always
speaking.
Huxley considers music’s singular capacity
for expressing the inexpressible:
In a different mode, or another plane of
being, music is the equivalent of some of man’s most significant and most
inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the
listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the
experiences themselves in their full force of life — it is a question of
intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up
either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the
heart are subject to no known law.
More than merely echoing our experience,
Huxley argues, music enlarges it:
Listening to expressive music, we have, not
of course the artist’s original experience (which is quite beyond us, for
grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experience in its kind of which
our nature is capable — a better and completer experience than in fact we ever
had before listening to the music.
But the most complete experience of all, the
only one superior to music, is silence:
When the inexpressible had to be expressed,
Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should
also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always
and everywhere, the rest is silence.
One of
Arthur Rackham’s rare 1917 illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
In a different piece from the same
collection, the uncommonly breathtaking title essay “Music at Night,” Huxley
revisits the subject of humanity’s most powerful medium of expression:
Moonless, this June night is all the more
alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming
lime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the
vines. There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of
the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly
harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train
is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the
warm living body of the night.
[…]
Suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate
confidence (for I had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what
music the machine would play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictus in
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis begins to trace patterns on the
moonless sky.
Huxley exhales:
The Benedictus. Blessed and
blessing, this music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep
and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine
interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious
sound, it pours itself, stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising
and falling, falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night
in another mode of being, as an essence is the equivalent of the flowers, from
which it is distilled.
“Blessedness
is within us all,” Patti Smith wrote in her beautiful elegy
for her soul mate, and it is the revelation of this
blessedness that Huxley celebrates as music’s highest power:
There is, at least there sometimes seems to
be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious
blessedness, of whose existence occasional accidents or providences (for me,
this night is one of them) make us obscurely, or it may be intensely, but
always fleetingly, alas, always only for a few brief moments aware. In
the BenedictusBeethoven gives expression to this awareness of
blessedness. His music is the equivalent of this Mediterranean night, or rather
of the blessedness at the heart of the night, of the blessedness as it would be
if it could be sifted clear of irrelevance and accident, refined and separated
out into its quintessential purity.
I
think immediately of Saul Bellow’s spectacular Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, in which he asserted: “Only art
penetrates … the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the
genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us
hints, which without art, we can’t receive.” For Huxley, no art swings
open the gates of reception more powerfully than music — but the language in
which it communicates to us that hidden, genuine reality is untranslatable into
our ordinary language:
Music “says” things about the world, but in
specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements
“in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the
truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable
from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms
the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious
truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in
the Missa Solemnisis a statement about the blessedness that is at
the heart of things. But this is about as far as “our words” will take us. If
we were to start describing in our “own words” exactly what Beethoven felt
about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be,
we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense… Only music, and
only Beethoven’s music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell
us with any precision what Beethoven’s conception of the blessedness at the heart
of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen — on a still June
night, by preference, with the breathing of the invisible sea for background to
the music and the scent of lime trees drifting through the darkness, like some
exquisite soft harmony apprehended by another sense.
Although Music
at Night and Other Essays belongs
in the sad cemetery of life-giving books that have perished out of print, used copies are still findable and very much worth
finding. Complement this particular portion with Henry Beston’s exquisite love
letter to nighttime, then revisit Huxley on the two types of
truth artists must reconcile, how we become
who we are, and his little-known
children’s book, then revisit other notable reflections
on the power of
music.
BY MARIA POPOVA
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/05/aldous-huxley-music-at-night/?mc_cid=8c122121c6&mc_eid=e6325151e8
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