The Beauty of Bach

This is a given. But I state it because I live in an era where much of what we once viewed as beautiful has become, if not ugly, at least unfashionable; and what was once viewed as ugly has become quite trendy. Therefore one mustn't assume anymore that people, ipso facto, hear the beauty of Bach. No, I think it is now only a few that live in quiet enough habitats to hear him. Just as it is only a few can stay a minute with quiet souls in a cathedral without busily taking pictures and hurrying out. Cathedrals, like Bach's cantatas, are made for us to rest in, pointing to the otherworldly, make one think that there was a place in which Beauty itself did indeed dwell, without taint, virginal in all its unblemished splendor. Don't we hunger for such a place? No styrofoam cups, no piles of bald tires, no polluted punctuation among the paragraphs and paragraphs of trees one reads on a hike, no plastic bags caught up in rose bushes, no canisters of aerosol bobbing in the still water of a bog, otherwise pristine in ferns and moss.

Yes, Bach possesses that purity that makes us wonder if our ears were indeed made for leaf blowers, gasoline powered lawn mowers, the roar of traffic on all the asphalt that cuts swaths through the amber grain of America the Beautiful, the heavy metal screeching out of amps in our own spirits---the arguments that occur in the lonely netherworld, the thump of hiphop pulsating in the rythmn meant to mimic an act at one time held to be sacred and the domain of unconditional love witnessed to God. Yes, Bach brings us back to give us an auditory taste of notes good for our souls. It pleads for us to pause, to wonder at what other things we spend our limited hearing on. It gives us yet a hint of sound, a single note to a symphony that yet awaits our reconciled and expectant hearing.