Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA nap is not a retreat from life, but a reconnaissance. — E. B. White

After lunch I nap.

My nap is accompanied by music played through earbuds, downloaded from an online app. Mostly I listen to familiar classical pieces – an opera, say, or symphony, or oratorio, or collections of a smaller musical genre (piano sonatas, orchestral suites, string quartets) – so I wake in a related but distinct sound environment, distant from where I started, without a clear recollection of how I got from there to here. Think of it as falling asleep on a train: the sway and pulse remind you you’ve been traveling, while the terrain traversed remains a blur. Waking I lie still, trying to pinpoint my musical whereabouts.

Sometimes my app, having completed a large piece, switches to another an algorithm suggested I’d enjoy. One can start out in Bach and end up in Offenbach, which is a shock, like boarding a train in Manhattan and waking up in Japan. The aural confusion discombobulates. My imagination has gotten lost. Bach and Offenbach use mostly the same musical language but, oh,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSo excellent a king; that was, to this,Hyperion to a satyr!

I allow my perplexity to resolve itself – retired, I am seldom in a rush – and having retraced my route, switch off the music and return to my words.

Napping I seldom listen to music composed during my lifetime, not because I dislike it, but because most of it was composed to discompose, not to soothe its listener. The serenity and optimism of the harmonic period from 1650 to 1950 – this is a vast oversimplification – has been replaced by anxiety, doubt, despair, as if greater awareness and material wellbeing led to less satisfaction with our lot. Lullabies shouldn’t jangle and jar.

Just now I woke in a musical heaven. The simplest of chorale-like melodies, simple as a child’s prayer, was succeeded by three exquisitely simple variations, which maintained the hushed atmosphere, only slightly altering the theme. Had I been a pianist, I’d have named this movement pronto it is so familiar, but through its length I couldn’t quite place it. The slow movement of a Beethoven piano sonata, yes – sublimely presented by pianist Igor Levit – but which? Not until a thunderous discord roused me like a fire alarm, did I know where I was. I yanked off my earbuds, jolted. In Sonata 23, of course! -- the one nicknamed the Appassionata – though not by Beethoven, who’d have denounced such commercial pandering – of all his thirty-two piano sonatas, Beethoven’s favorite (though who could choose from such an array!).

How, I wondered, might I depict the quiet rapture I’d just experienced, subsiding now into a glowing ember of recollection? Words are wimps when it comes to heavy emotional lifting. Walter Pater, who got much wrong, got this precisely right: “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” Oh, to have been a composer, not a wordmonger – but of grace, gratitude, beatitude, not of late twentieth century anguish: a composer who hugs, cuddles, rocks: a murmurer of lullabies!

If you know the music called classical, you know Sonata 23, only its outer movements are so stormy and difficult to play they distract from its peaceful, prayerful core. To quaff a dose of calm – sorely in need these days – listen just to the middle movement, that simple theme and those three simple variations – then again. Linger in the cathedral of man’s imagination, where all is hushed and the Lord’s sweet light softly filters from high clerestories. Man can be so good! But why so seldom? Why such stupidity, corruption, cruelty? Why can’t we pray!