Circumstances had kept us from concerts for months. Concerts – of classical music – are, you might say, our spiritual sinews. Jane and I first elided over Wagner. We gulp operas and symphonies like ichor. Of the passions we share, none’s more fervent than this sort of music. We hold with Nietzsche: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

            We’d been away, but now here we were, in our beloved Carnegie Hall, seats filling, instruments tuning, audience murmurous before the houselights dimmed, performers settled into their seats, and the conductor emerged to applause. This program would be what many rank as the greatest music ever – Bach’s B-Minor Mass – played by one of the world’s foremost expositors of this tricky repertory. Few in this sold-out theater, I’ll wager, did not know this score almost well enough to sing along. This band had recorded this piece several times. We hoped to hear nothing jarringly new. Yet the tension tingled as before a child’s Christmas. We needed to hear this familiar piece again played by these players – needed to – as the devout need to pray.

            I scanned the eager crowd. What, I wondered, possessed us?

            Why we love what we love is never simply explained. We may assert, “Because it is so beautiful, exciting, memorable, etc.,” but this is tautology, not analysis. Memory, instinct, experience, relationships combine to form this imperious emotion. For sure we can never tease these strands apart – but we can try.

            Love fills a need. Souls like bodies get famished for sustenance. Scientists can explain what our bodies need from food. But what do we need from art, which we do not physically require? (Jane and I had been away from concerts for months, and we had not died.)

            Appetite measures emptiness. Some vacancy inside us needs to be filled. The sated lion does not hunt; neither the sated soul.

            What am I missing in my life that I need art? I am comfortably settled, blissfully companioned, “snug as a bug in the rug,” in the old lingo. No complaints except age, which can’t be helped, and even that I welcome as preferable to the alternative. No complaints, but still this restive distress if I do not hear music daily like a dose.

            I call this appetite Why. Humans, Puppy Henry assures me, are the only creature who pose this preposterous query. Why are we here? How, therefore, should we be? The question has no answer, of course – we know that deep down – yet it troubles us even so. We want to feel we matter, which we obviously don’t in the endless arc of time.

            Art insensibly posits purpose. It feels like an explanation, though it explains nothing. It superimposes on the commotion of being a convincing order. If Michelangelo can paint his ceiling and Shakespeare imagine King Lear and Bach compose his mass, life must make sense, mustn’t it? Reason may chuckle at this assertion, but our hearts know better.

            Why aches more in some people than others. Many humans don’t ask why or care. We’re here, let’s make the best of it. Henry approves of this approach. Why worry oneself seeking answers that don’t exist?

            I’ve no idea why I ask why, but so what, I’m stuck with who I am. My need for Bach is palpable, palpitating, involuntary. Even to anticipate the opening notes of this Kyrie sets me salivating like a hungry hound. We are intimate together in the experience, listeners and players, straining toward a fulfillment we can’t explain. At the “Ex resurrexit” – arguably the most startling surprise in all of art – I wept again.