Amor Fati—Part IV: Nature and Music

Without music, life would be a mistake.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Previous installments in this series:

• Amor Fati—Part I: Introduction
• Amor Fati—Part II: Vastness
• Amor Fati—Part III: Acceptance and Rebellion

In his poem, The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry confessed, “When despair for the world grows in me […] I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. / I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

For most of my life, I have been prone to episodes of depression—periods sometimes lasting for weeks at a stretch, marked by feelings of deep sadness, hopelessness, and existential angst. Despite being a common affliction, the causes of depression are still not fully understood and common treatment methods often fail to alleviate it. People suffering from so-called “major” or “clinical” depression often evolve their own remedies and regimens to persevere and alleviate these difficult experiences. For naturalists like me, time spent in natural surroundings is a common form of self-therapy. But even then, relief is never guaranteed.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy expressed a concern that I find very relatable: the fear that if even time spent in nature fails to heal, a naturalist may feel doomed to despair, having no further recourse. In an interview, Goldsworthy said, “I’m dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn’t work, if this doesn’t sustain me, I can’t go back to nature. I’m right there. There’s nowhere to go to, and that frightens me. If I get disillusioned with this, there’s nothing left.”

I believe he was wrong. One powerful form of emotional healing that is left when so many others fail, is music.

I was reminded of Goldsworthy’s concern recently when, in the throes a depressive episode, I stepped out of the house in the morning, as I do most days, to savor the early morning sunlight, hoping to find a bit of solace in the cool air, in the sights, sounds, and scents of nature. Before long, the resident pair of ravens appeared as if on cue, cawing and chasing each other playfully in the air. Ravens mate and remain within their territory for life. They are intelligent, highly adaptable birds. I watched them for a while, soaring, rolling, play-tussling, calling to each other.

On most days I find the ravens’ antics and daily rituals endearing and entertaining. Alas, in my low state of mind, my thoughts drifted to darker realms. I envied them. They had their lives figured out, were not lacking for anything, did not seem at all stressed or burdened, and clearly enjoyed their play and each other’s company. All seemed to contrast with and amplify my own feelings of ennui and despair.

Among the benefits of practicing meditation and mindfulness is that in time one evolves the capacity to recognize when thoughts and feelings bubble up in the mind, and the ability to separate from them, if only briefly and just enough as to examine them consciously and consider if and how to respond to them. Music is one of my failsafe ways of responding to various emotions. I may reach for it to amplify certain desirable moods such as inspiration, aesthetic enjoyment, or a sense of awe. I may also use music to help intensify and concentrate attention when I need it or, conversely, to free my mind from focusing on anything in particular so I can lose myself in wonder and sensory bliss. I also turn to music for solace when I feel the familiar pangs of sadness and anxiety arising.

I retrieved my headphones from my pocket, brought up the music player on my phone, selected a playlist of English classics without giving it much thought, and used the player’s shuffle feature to pick a random track. The first notes of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending began to play. The predictable effect was instant and palpable. I could feel calmness setting in. As the music played, the beauty of the sunlight, the plants, the shimmering droplets of dew, and the antics of the playful birds seemed to intensify moment by moment. About fifteen minutes later, as Vaughan Williams’s last notes faded and gave way to Edward Elgar’s Sospiri, I was no longer the person I was just moments before, beset by sadness and despair. The dark feelings were not gone, but they no longer dominated my thoughts. As Hermann Hesse (who suffered from depression, as well) put it in one of his beautiful accounts of wandering, “the world has become lovelier than before.”

“Music,” wrote Nietzsche, “unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things.” Before him, Arthur Schopenhauer proclaimed that “music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves.”

Neurologist Oliver Sacks examined the link between music and emotions. In his book, Musicophilia, he noted, “Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music.” More recent research suggests that a person doesn’t need to be a musician to experience music’s emotional effects—our brains are pre-wired for it. Even just imagining a piece of music activates parts of our brains used for auditory processing and arouses similar cognitive effects to those we experience when hearing music.

Art critic Walter Pater stated famously, “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” This is because, while other arts rely on various materials (contents) arranged in certain ways (form) to achieve their emotional effect, music affects our emotions by form alone—which is to say that, unlike other arts which must rely on tangible materials, music is entirely abstract in the material sense. It is no surprise that so much art—both ancient and modern—deliberately eschews precise realism and employs at least some degree of abstraction and departure from realistic appearances. Wassily Kandinsky is one example of an artist who was not a musician “aspiring to the condition of music”—to emotional expression through abstraction. In his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote, “A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of color, for setting color in motion.”

It is worth mentioning that the short-lived movement in art dubbed Realism, when artists sought to reproduce realistic-looking appearances without embellishment or abstraction, in exquisite details, did not come about as a natural progression from former styles; rather, it arose as a form of protest against the physical and emotional ravages of the industrial revolution and the shift away from rural, agrarian lifestyles toward urban living that came with it. Likewise, it is worth mentioning that the Realist movement declined quickly, returning art to the path of abstraction, in response to the growing popularity of one specific technology: photography.

Photography’s capacity to render realistic appearances and minute details without relying on honed manual skill had the effect of “awakening” and reminding artists of the expressive powers of abstraction—of “the condition of music,” as Pater dubbed it—making them realize they have strayed from art’s mission of transcending, rather than representing, reality—helping human beings find meaning in and connection with a reality that did not always cater to their physical or emotional needs. “Art has no right to exist,” wrote philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “if, content to reproduce reality, it uselessly duplicates it.”

Alas, this awakening—that has given us such art movements as impressionism, expressionism, cubism, and surrealism—seems to have been lost to history, especially among photographers in the modern age who have found their way to art without knowing its history. I believe it is worth prodding photographers who aspire to express themselves artistically to learn this history—to consider and perhaps to also to awaken to the reasons why Realism came into existence (as a protest, as Bertrand Russell put it, “against too much artificiality”) and why it was abandoned after a short while when artists realized that their realistic-looking art limited their expressive range largely to nostalgia but denied them the broader and more complex forms of expressions that demanded abstraction from realism—especially as realistic renderings have become commonplace and easy to achieve by technological means and thus no longer served as measures of skill—either technical or expressive—in an artist.

Philosophically speaking, aspiring to the “condition of music” does not just refer to the aesthetic effects of abstraction, to the mechanics and technicalities of any medium, or to the academic characterization of certain styles and sensibilities. The condition of music may also relate to our attitude toward life itself. Specifically, to the theme of this series of articles—amor fati: love your fate. Our attitude toward life comes from how we interpret our circumstances and experiences: the stories we tell (either by choice or by passively accepting ones our minds conjure intuitively) about ourselves, our place in the world, our histories, our ethics: our fate. And in storytelling, as in art, abstraction—the condition of music—may play a powerful tool in shaping perceptions, feelings, and attitudes, which is to say that abstraction—when applied deliberately to reality as it comes to us by way our senses and intellect—may shape our attitudes toward loving our fates, even in the face of great challenges.

In life, just as in art, abstraction can be a way of humanizing reality: of endowing the objective details of reality with ulterior and subjective human meanings—symbolizing, enriching, and transcending the cold facts of reality, shaping them into human experiences: emotions, concepts, metaphors, sensations. Since our brains are innately susceptible to responding emotionally to music, we may use music deliberately to shape out experiences, our feelings, our outlooks, our sense of meaning. Music may alleviate some of our primitive and painful responses to some (real or imagined) aspects of life—responses such as anxiety, sadness, hopelessness, ennui, despair, lack of inspiration. Music offers us a means of controlling our own brains in ways that factual, rational thinking cannot: a way to “hack” our brains and force them into certain desirable states, feelings, and attitudes, and aways from less-desirable ones.

As with artistic abstraction, we may use also cognitive abstraction to obliterate reality altogether and to find solace in denial of reality. Or, we may apply abstraction sparingly and in measure as to influence our interpretations of and feelings toward reality without denying it—to place the hard facts of reality in a context of our choosing, to associate with reality—any reality—our own consciously curated emotions and interpretations rather than allowing these to arise subconsciously from primitive, survival-oriented circuitry in our brains—to, as Albert Camus put it, draw reality from “the shadows of evolution” and to “bring it to the light of creation.” Music gives us a powerful tool to do so. By pairing our experiences with the “right” kind of music, we may control our perceptions. “Music,” wrote Aristotle, “directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.”

The great humanitarian, physician, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Schweitzer, considered reverence for life to be his guiding moral principle and his greatest contribution to the world. Deeply attuned to suffering, both in human and in non-human beings, he wrote, “As far back as I can remember I was saddened by the amount of misery I saw in the world around me.” Schweitzer made it his life’s work to alleviate suffering. Throughout his career, ministering and treating thousands of patients, he witnessed much pain and heartbreak. One might wonder how a person who thought so intensely about, and came into regular contact with, so much suffering, found respite and kept his own sanity. The answer: at least in large part, through music. Schweitzer wrote, “Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter—to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”

This effect of music is why, when life bears down, when even immersing myself in sublime natural beauty offers me no solace or escape from dark thoughts; when the rational part of my brain seems to take perverse pleasure in pointing out that some concerns, fears, or other afflictions are logical, valid, and justified, and I feel powerless to make a rational counter-argument—I reach for music. Music does not deny reality; it shapes my perception of reality—it allows me to augment reality with desirable and useful qualities of my own choosing. Music awakens the part of my brain that has the power to stare down all other parts—the rational, the cynical, the intellectual, the pessimist—and to tell them calmly and confidently: “yes, you may be right, but so what? There is still life left to be lived; there is only so much time left to revel, to experience, to savor, to feel, to care, to love, to seek knowledge and understanding, to find meaning. Stop wasting it. Fate is here. Life is here. May as well love it.”