Luftmensch
What will it be like to hear a symphony from space?
September 7
First day of classes. I was assigned a paper already. Explain what Hobbes and Locke mean by the state of nature. Professor Macawber. Political philosophy. It feels odd to be starting university when this tone is playing. Awful loud, filling the air, so much so that Macawber was shouting at us. His reputation is one for shouting anyway. This tone, this noise, a single note, origin unknown. Except, we know it hails from a million light years away. However fascinating it is, the experts say, there is nothing to worry about. No need to take shelter, no need to change our plans.
September 9
Today the noise evolved. A major third was added. An E, revealing the previous tone to be a C. Not mere noise. I was toiling away at the library coffee shop. Everybody stopped and looked like they wanted to cry. The boy next to me was drinking a Coca Cola from a glass bottle, and he offered me a sip, yet before I could accept, he licked the perspiration from the bottle! A major third. It is loud still, hard to ignore, hard to sleep through, assaulted by joy as we are.
September 15
Now a fifth has been added: G. It was there when I woke up, like reveille. C-E-G: a chord. The music majors on campus are distressed. A group of violinists has taken over the student union. They’re combating this pleasant chord with atonal jabs. “We are not consonant creatures!” one importuned me. I offered him a Coca Cola. He declined. I had none, anyway. Everyone is both astonished by and immune to the chord from another galaxy. It is a TV show in the background, it is weather, it’s all we talk about, but it becomes easy to forget.
September 22
I turned in my paper. The music majors’ revolutionary attitude infected me. What state of nature? I asked. What are you talking about, sir? More eloquently, of course. A new tone arrived as the sun went down. Someone said it was a B. There is melancholy in the chord now. After a flavorless meal at the dining hall, mashed potatoes, withered greens, I circled the library like a bird after a shift in the magnetic field.
September 24
Professor Macawber gave me a C+. This is not an argument, he wrote in the margins, this is just an attitude. At the end, he added: Just because you don’t find this enlightening doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach you. I approached him after class. The E shifted half a tone: E flat. The B became a B flat. We had entered a minor key. Come see me during my office hours, said Professor Macawber. The fact that several students were crying from the chord change didn’t impinge on his consciousness.
September 25
This is important stuff! Professor Macawber shouted in his office. The chord was no longer stationary. It was moving, evolving into an Ellington Suite. Outside, under dark colonnades, the violinists gathered in the courtyard. They put down their horse-hair bows. It’s important, Macawber said again. Horse-hair, I said to him. Perhaps he couldn’t hear the music. What star, what fine minds, were sending these tones out to the greater universe? Soon its beauty became inhuman. From this simple thought experiment, a state of nature, said the professor, we started to ask how we ought to govern ourselves. How did he not hear the music?