On Music

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
— Aldous Huxley

Words have long served as conduits for the dreams, fears, and ambitions that defined humanity with the passage of the centuries. Whether as a weapon to destroy or a tool to inspire, their power to immortalize both the malice and marvels of civilization is undeniable. In conveying our most intimate musings and imaginings, they act as a common thread across the ages, a window into the minds of their creators and ourselves. Yet, in the vastness of human experience, even the grandest prose is but an abstraction of the world it reflects, bounded by the limitations of our conscious reality and the pursuit of reason in a life fraught with its madness. By confining itself to what is expressible to the mind, language often fails to capture the purity and timelessness of emotion, reducing it to that which is material or perceivable.

To truly capture the unseen or the metaphysical, we must venture into an inner world—a realm freed from the palliatives of order and ideology in the pursuit higher ideals. Here, music, perhaps more than any other medium, imbues our experience with a wonder and depth that words can scarcely rival. In structuring the conventions with which to define them, language offers but a glimpse into their immensity; be it the rage and ailments of war or the unbridled reveries of love, only the illusion of experience is ever conveyed. Beyond these limitations, the simplest melody could awaken even most distant of memories, breathing color into times long forgotten, to the joys of a shared humanity. Therein lies the magic; the transcendance of the material in pursuit of the universal,the dionysian pursuit of beauty amidst the veritys of our mortality. For what is a world without feeling? What are we if not a vessel for the memories that they inspire? Whilst language is an embodiment of the mind in it’s ceasless yearning to create and understand, music signifies the glories of the human spirit, the desire to dream, to love, and most importantly, to live.