I want to tell you about a recent shock, but it’s hard.

The trick of any expressive medium is to make one’s audience feel what occurred – to infuse not just inform. Whether one’s medium is paint, sounds, motion, marble, language, this translation – of information into feeling – is a trick, like a magician’s transformation of a stiff stick into gossamer scarves. A word-maker’s kit offers sound, sense, syntax, lexicon, accent, rhythm, pace, pauses – skimpy tools for the task at hand.

My shock was real – my ground still shudders days after – but so particular I doubt I can bring it to life. Art is analogy: this picture – or music – or paragraph – while not our experience, reminds us of it. I’ve never killed a king, but Shakespeare persuades me how it feels (for it turns out we’re all king-killers deep down).

The shock occurred three-ish in the afternoon, jolting me from my delectable postprandial nap. My rigidly regimented day has many highlights – breakfast, lunch with Jane watching a lecture, a walk with Henry, cribbage at dusk, dinner and a movie, but none surpasses the sensual satisfaction of deep slumber after a morning of writing and a lunch of soothing soup. My nap is ushered in through earphones. My music is what is called classical, an unsatisfactory designation for “a type of art music that originated in Europe and is characterized by its complexity, structure, and use of orchestral ensembles” – to let AI do my writing for me. Why my soul craves this sort of music instead of folk, jazz, k-pop, plainsong is a matter of rearing. This is the language I know and love. I love it for the same reason Poles prefer lard to butter (go figure!).

My preferred nap music is melodic and harmonic, composed without irony before the twentieth century, intended to console. I don’t mind harsh music in concert or opera hall, but it hardly lullabies. I bob on my music like Huck and Jim on their pleasant river-raft. The music magically melts into sleep-visions – I listen asleep, but differently than awake.

This afternoon’s program was the slow movement of Bruckner’s Third. (Here’s where this account gets impossibly specific: if “Bruckner’s Third” means nothing to you – and why should it? – this writer has his work cut out for him.) The light in a Bruckner symphony resembles a Gothic cathedral’s, angling through high clerestories from an invisible sky. The light, being holy, is indifferent to the groundlings gazing up. Individuality dissolves into luminosity. We glint like dust specks brightened by this unearthly glow.

If the foregoing paragraph sounds over-the-top, that’s how Bruckner affects me, nowhere more forcibly than in the Third’s slow movement, marked “Adagio (Bewegt, quasi andante)” – “with motion but not too much motion” – a tribute, we’re told, to his revered master Wagner, who’d recently died. My selfish self dissolves in this warmth like butter into translucence. I no longer matter, only what flavor I might add.

I woke with a shock to some different music a wayward algorithm had mischievously picked – the Act II Intermezzo from Adriana LeCouvreur, an opera I loathe, whose sound-soup conjures upholstered bordellos. Though I’ve never paid for sex, never wanted to, this music sounds like that transaction, fulsome and phony.

I woke alarmed what had happened to poor Bruckner! Ripped from his ecstatic vision of the divine into tawdry servitude to his lust’s demands? So are we all “untimely ripped” from our dreams of perfection, recalled to our brutish inadequacy. Only – praise be! – Bruckner didn’t compose these treacly enticements, another composer did, whom I won’t name lest you look him up.