Writing about music is as hard as not writing about it. For if you love writing you think there’s nothing you can’t explore. “Homo sum humani a me alienum puto,” wrote the Roman Terence; “Since I’m human, nothing human’s alien to me.” Yet try writing about music and you’re soon shipwrecked on the twin shoals of technical jargon on the one hand or flaccid adjectives on the other. What’s called classical music makes no sense if the terms fugue, counterpoint, arioso, alla breve, et cetera, bring nothing to mind, while descriptors like sweet, angry, blithe, jolly, mournful, et cetera could fit anything like an old sock. Yet love, as someone said, is the talkative passion, so if you love music you keep trying, even with your tongue in knots.

I love music, have since before I loved words. For my first twenty years I dreamed of making music my life, then quit the dream, for the music of my moment didn’t please my ear and I had no gift of imagining sweetness that had never been heard. Instead, music became the reason I live. In sounds I hear sense; from them I derive solace. Words that don’t sound sweet stare at me hostile as an ambulance. I don’t know how lawyers survive – or the authors of instructions. I can’t read instructions, they’re so vilely written, which complicates existence in this epoch of devices. That very noun, devices, afflicts me like shrieking chalk, except in the employ of Archbishop Cranmer, who really knew how to write. (“We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” he memorably confessed.) I drink music as I do liquid, not to die of thirst, holding with Nietzsche, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Jane might chide me for clearing my throat here, writing about writing instead of about what I mean to be writing, but the impossibility of expressing music’s addictive appeal is part of it. We do not love what we understand but what we don’t, for understanding reduces wonder to the condition of a fact, which can be easily stowed. Love mystifies, transfixes, transforms, introduces us to corners of our being never detected or suspected. When I say I love Jane I have no idea what that means or ever will though I know it to be true. Ditto my kids, Henry, you guys, God. I used to love America that way until… but enough of that.

Recently I’ve been living with, listening to, reading about, marveling at, weeping and rejoicing with Beethoven, whom I’ve known since my single digits, listened to, played (badly), thought about, and, it turns out, never known, if knowing means understanding. I heard the notes and sonorities, sure, I could hum many old favorites start to finish, but somehow not the soul behind the notes, hurtling them toward me with their urgent report. The magic of music is that of intimacy, it is never the same, year to year, even hour to hour. Love ever sees with fresh eyes and hears with fresh ears. No more can I repeat myself for never can I be again who I was. (Borges makes this point in one of his crisp little fables.)

Much of today I have passed with the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue, Opus 133), one of poor, sick, hurting, deaf, delusional Beethoven’s searing, ecstatic, other-worldly final utterances, how it came to be, what he meant by it, felt about it, and I’m flailing like a drowning person for one word, one, that I might seize to keep afloat, as you can probably hear.