Michael Rainey, a ham radio friend from New Hampshire posted this on Facebook today. I thought I'd share it here too. It is the chapter called, "Soul-Shards" from
Douglas Hofstadter's book, "I Am A Strange Loop", a book I have not read (yet).
"One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father
died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents house and my mother,
looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps
fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning
does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of
paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The
bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning
because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not
quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be
considered.
After a few minutes of emotional pondering -
soul-searching, quite literally - I hit upon an analogy that I felt
could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend
her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was
along the following lines.
“In the living room we have a
book of the Chopin etudes for piano. All of its pages are just pieces
of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and
foldable as the photograph of Dad - and yet, think of the powerful
effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years
now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold
thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving
their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns,
producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of
great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of
listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in
Frederic Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to
Chopin’s interiority - to the experience of living in the head, or
rather the soul, of Frederic Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper
are no less than soul-shards - scattered remnants of the shattered soul
of Frederic Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a
unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny
fragment of the internal experiences of another human being - his
sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions - and we thereby
know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and
many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion,
looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him
intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness,
activates inside our living brains some of the most central
representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his
soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like
the score to a Chopin etude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone
departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”
Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my
mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it
had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there,
on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember
that exchange."
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