Monday, back in school. Classes aren't so bad, and I have now finished all of the readings for the week, which leaves Latin, Greek, and the flute. Whenever I meet anyone or do anything or have any longings or stirrings, the flute is always the first study of mine to languish -- of all the things I do it would seem at first glance the least necessary to my being, for after all I intend no carreer in the field of music; furthermore I am well past the stage of my life where I could reasonably hold any such aspirations -- great musicians train from youth, are sought out like Jesus from childhood.

And yet in some ways I feel that technical accomplishment in music is to the man a most important asset. It provides, if nothing else, a free and entirely reliable source of entertainment; furthermore, it entertains not only oneself, but others, and is hence the more sociable. And music has the additional virtue of penetrating beyond the ephemeral pleasures of the body into a realm where the mind and the soul are connected. When we listen to music, we recognize not only the subtle strains of philosophy, but life itself beating and breathing in the rhythms and cadences. Outstanding musical ability is a of class with excellence in writing, reading, and speaking; but whereas in each one of these there is the danger of surpassing the stuff of life and falling readily into a realm of particulars, the apt musician cannot afford but to connect on a deep level of being with his music. Who would be moved by a song if it were simply an exercise in fifths and harmonics or the transposition of majors into minors and themes up octaves, the retreat of an ever retreating abstraction? But music is present, music is transubstatiation, and music is the perfect discipline in that it expresses without words those things which writing itself can express but feebly. It is for this reason, I believe, that they use music in movies -- because how are we to know grief except when we hear the strenuous sobs of a violin? And it is also for this reason that we so often make fun of movies that use musical themes badly -- because the music, in this case, is so much stronger than the actor's own verbal delivery, so much graver than the situation at hand, that we can only laugh at the bathos, the unallayed chasm between musical passion and absurd physicality. If I were to quit all studies altogether, the orator might urge in high voice, seething in pitch, how I should yet retain the study and faculty for music in that my soul, being carried high and higher above the valleys, the clefts, the peak, the rocks, might finally gaze, through harmony, on the wide open skies and the perfect stretching expanse of mountains. Of course I might reply to this man that just as music is an art that can be done well or badly, so too for craft of thought and speech, but he would have me when he replied that while it is so easy to be subtle it is so hard to be good, as in the field of music so in the field of thought, and that her virtue lies not in the difficulty for the performer, but in the ease with which the audience measures his worth; now there are many professors of esteemed reputation who are but sophists, but a bad musician is scented as quickly as rotting meat.