Is big better than small – more impressive, worthy?

Call this the Chopin question. Chopin was a miniaturist. Some of his piano pieces last less than a minute – vivid and haunting, notwithstanding their stature. With larger musical forms – the concerto or sonata – he was less comfortable, less original.

While Chopin (b. 1810) was composing his small pieces, Wagner (b. 1813) was composing his big ones. Wagner didn’t know from small. The playing time of his final music drama, Parsifal, is more than five hours, not including time to and from the opera house. Both makers in their art were unrivaled geniuses. Should we applaud Wagner louder?

Cultures differ in their admiration of scale. For the old Egyptians, Romans, Aztecs, European monarchs, the bigger the better. Bigger expressed power, control. Capitalism can’t build big enough, as vaunting urban sky-needles suggest. The lobby of the new J.P. Morgan/Chase building in midtown Manhattan could accommodate a spacious home for fifty. Its imperious message is clear: Bow down.

The Japanese and other cultures influenced by monastic traditions (Zen, Buddhist, Jain, the ascetic Christian saints) discourage ostentation. God is great and man is small; to flaunt is to offend. Poor rural cultures favor simplicity because that’s all they can afford. Wagner’s spirit allies with the boasters, Chopin’s with the monks’.

My heritage made me want to make big. How about War and Peace or Proust’s whopper? I got why Pound wanted to stack up all those Cantos, though never what his obfuscatory verbiage was trying to say.

My nature balked at big. Periodical pieces, journal entries, twelve-line poems were capacious enough. Montaigne, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson loomed as giants to my timid, tentative heart.

This contest – between ambition and volition, materialism and monasticism, public and personal – explains my zigzag earthly adventure. My two natures defied each other with ferocious contempt. What I wanted was never what I wanted. Until now. With retirement I shoveled the big ME into the ground. Good riddance. If small is what I feel like making, so be it. How about six hundred words a day – and the odd poem or journal freshet?

How to explain this preference? Language gets tricky here. Does modesty equal inferiority? (“He has a lot to be modest about!”) Uncertainty equal stupidity? Is inability to settle on a certain truth my spirit’s hedge against being wrong? Is Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism a convenient form of cowardice? Do Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s isolation arise from conviction or reluctance to compete?

I’m never sure. But for sure I recoil from the monstrosity of our moment, the callous swagger, towering towers, brutality and crudity of plutocrats and of our loathsome swaggerer-in-chief. I would vomit them out if I knew how. Could it be my embrace of sensitive smallness implicitly rebukes their preposterous giantism? Am I, in my own way, showing off?

Certainty is a redoubt from doubt; who knows for sure has quit thinking. Of this I’m sure. I’ve never met an answer one couldn’t cripple with questions. If truth can’t be known with confidence, it behooves us to be modest. Humility makes sense. Big isn’t bad unless it scorns the small. I hate the J.P. Morgan/Chase lobby for its pitiless dismissal of the poor. Shame.

The more I think, the more I think our moment is dangerously confused. We build too tall, inviting leveling; we are swollen with self-importance. Poor folks elect officials who rejoice in depriving the poor. We lie and call it truth, make war and call it peace. We gloat.

It is not superstition, but sobriety, that anticipates retribution. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.