Recently, I was looking at a list of quotations having to do with skepticism. Most were unexceptional platitudes either for or against. One, however, was extraordinary: “In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.”
The first thing that is odd about this is the grouping of cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. Then there is the contrast between those and living musically. And of course there is the question as to what “to live more musically” means.
The author of this peculiar utterance was Vincent Van Gogh, who has come to be regarded as the archetype of the mentally and emotionally unstable artist. But those who have read Van Gogh’s letters know that he was also a remarkably lucid and insightful writer. The quote I have cited may seem odd at first glance, but it richly repays a closer look.
To begin with, there is a brand of skepticism that is merely cynical and amounts to little more than humbug. It is routinely on display at cocktail parties, art openings, and on television talk shows. It is the main ingredient in what is called conventional wisdom, and amounts to nothing more than ideas diluted into fashion statements.
It must be accounted among the wonders of the contemporary world how one can move from a conversation over dinner to a chat in a theater lobby to a brief exchange in a supermarket checkout line and hear different people saying the same things about the same subjects in pretty much the same terms. It’s as if everyone were all reading from the same script. Among a certain set, conversation has devolved into a game of Chinese whispers [1]. One is reminded of Yeats’s poem “The Scholars”:
All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
It is easy to see why Van Gogh would have contrasted the version of this he was familiar with to music. What could be more unmusical than saying what everybody else is saying? There is a place for unison in music, but no place for monotony, absence of variation, no change of tempo, and — above all — lack of invention.
But Van Gogh’s point actually has little to do with the terms of contrast and everything to do with the relation between the things being contrasted. He does not suggest that we do anything about the cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. He says only that eventually we will have had our fill of them.
Notice, though, what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that, when we have had our fill of them, we will live more musically. He says only that we will want to. It is a subtle point, subtly made. There is a wistfulness to it, a gentleness, that makes the sentence itself — which is perfectly shaped — seem almost like a melody.
So what might it mean, to live more musically? Well, to spell it out in any great detail would, I suspect, be most unmusical. Think instead of song and dance, of themes and variations, of counterpoint, how voices and tunes can weave in and out among each other, and think of how life — or at least the living of it — could more nearly resemble those.
In the meantime, we are left having to put up with a badinage of talking points.
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Frank Wilson [4]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [6])
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