It was only a little more than 100 years ago that the only time anyone heard music, ever, was one somebody else was playing it. There was no recording, only performance, and musicians played an important role in the community (you could only hear music as good as the local musician could play it!). Listening to music was a community activity. People gathered in groups to listen to the sweet sounds, alive for a moment and then gone forever. They listened, and they understood the fragility of life, its fleeting, momentary existence, and they grew together.
Music was studied and understood and appreciated. It was listened to actively (not mere background noise for something else). And its memory lingered, people pored over the thoughts, the individual phrases, the magnificent whole of a musical composition.
How can we ever begin to understand the implications of artificiality? Curse the invention of the gramophone, the CD, the iPod- music has become an insipid marketing tool, a worthless distraction, and one more lonely indulgence to get absorbed in (the last thing a world saturated with loneliness needs). Picture two twenty-somethings next to one another on the train: in a sane world, they’d look at one another, smile, and talk. But they’re both wearing iPods, floating alone through cacophonous abstraction, both probably listening to songs about loneliness and alienation.
The compartmentalization of music is one example of a larger trend. Suburban neighborhoods are more like rows of housing units, waiting for some car or another to take them from the building they sleep to the one in which they work or go to school; neighbors can go their entire lives without getting to know or even meeting one another. Parallel lives. Sports, like music, have become the work of distant professionals. A small number of dominant athletes do all the playing (once people graduate high school they lose interest in athletics, except so far as is necessary to maintain an acceptable physical appearance); everyone else watches them. Watching a football game: ten sets of eyes directed at one glowing piece of furniture. Lives in parallel, experiencing a mediated sense of satisfaction at a bunch of strangers who play ball near them. And field down the street is deserted while the games are on.
My point here is that it’s a lonely world, and everyone knows it. There are fewer and fewer opportunities to share experiences with the people around us. In order to live healthy, full lives in a world where human contact is marginalized in favor of hopeless distraction, it’s necessary to go out of your way to connect with those around you. Even if your efforts almost always end in discouragement and disappointment. Though it may be difficult, and you may lose the respect of superficial shelter-seekers who hide from real experience, the alternative is a solitary technological prison in which you are your own jailer, with TV and antidepressants the only opiates to numb the rebellious yearning for real life within you.
You make your choice every day.