A Tune We Have Not Yet Heard

Music in art: poster found at a flea market

by Anne White

In his address The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis said:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (emphasis his)

Yes, the pile of books can betray us.  A book can disappoint. It can have a terrible ending. It can make us angry. It can bore us. It can leave us in tears or give us nightmares.  The whole pile could (literally or metaphorically) fall on our heads and kill us.

The music we love can suddenly become insufficient. A few among us may remember the ratings-busting finale of M*A*S*H* (in 1983, further back now than the actual Korean War was when we were watching it).  Near the beginning of the episode, Dr. Charles Winchester discovers that five captured Chinese soldiers are musicians, and he begins teaching them to play a Mozart clarinet quintet, using their own instruments. Later, the prisoners are taken away as part of a prisoner exchange (playing Mozart as they go). But just as a ceasefire is being announced, they are killed in a last round of enemy attacks.  When Winchester hears this, he goes to his tent and tries to listen to the Mozart record, but ends up smashing it to pieces. It is not only the music that betrayed him, but everything else in which he put his trust and which it represented.

Charlotte Mason also warned us about seeking beauty too much for its own sake:

The Beauty Sense adds so much to the joy of life that it is not easy to see what danger attends it...[We may think that] that the joys of Beauty are so full and satisfying that nothing else is necessary to complete the happiness of life...The person who is given up to the intoxication of Beauty conceives that Beauty and Goodness are one and the same thing, and that Duty is no more than seeking one's own pleasure in the ways one best likes. People, too, become excluded. (Ourselves Book I, p. 54)

We are fully allowed to value poetry, visual art, music, plays, and the natural world (including its tastes and textures). But we can love the scent of the flower, the echo of the tune, the rhythm of the sonnet (as Mason says) without becoming intoxicated by them. When they show themselves (as the Greek philosophers said) as only shadows of the true and wonderful things yet to come, we can understand and not grieve for what they are not, knowing that it is what comes "through them" that really matters.

And as our friend Lynn used to say, that enables us to enjoy every sandwich.