Music and Homework, Learning how to do these things again

I've been listening to music. And working on a homework assignment. How is it that I used to do this all the time?

Back then I had a room all to myself, and I didn't have to worry about waking someone up from his nap. I could listen to it loudly, I could listen to it quietly, and sing as much as I wanted. It didn't bother anyone. At the time my homework assignments involved line drawings made with T-square and angle, cutting mat board with a utility knife, pasting drawing to page, creating templates for fabric design, laborful but mindless tasks that left mind open to experience sound. My friend Sharon once pointed out to me that each of us only lacked a couple of credits to have an minor in art. Back then I didn't have to make dinner for anyone but me.

I remember when I got my first copy of Five Wise Virgins by 100 Portraits. I lay on the floor of a housemate's room with my eyes closed and listened and cried and prayed through the entire thing. It is a recording that is too rich to listen to over and over again, but just the thing when you're feeling a little lonely, or need a different kind of gateway to worship.

These days I listen to music only when my children will let me, while I'm washing dishes, folding clothes or taking the dog for a walk. It used to happen sometimes while I was waiting without patience for something on the computer to load. Once or twice I closed my eyes and listened while the boys were down for their naps, but not in a while. It takes me thirty exposures before understand all the words. Occasionally it takes that long for me to decide whether I like what I'm hearing or not.

I love music. I love lyrics. I'd like to learn how to listen to both again.

My husband is only interested in a certain level of technical proficiency combined with adaptability when it comes to music. Trained as a jazz musician and admiring the likes of Charlie Parker and Michael Brecker, if a performance isn't compositionally nuanced and layered it is unlikely to win his approval. I hope he doesn't object to my characterization as such. I'd hate to learn that I had misrepresented him.

I am much more interested in lyrics. I want to hear songs that express the highs and lows of human experience, though narrative songs in the form of ballads drive me batty.

The homework I worked on today came from the exercises at the end of the Adler/Van Doren book. In one such exercise for the testing of elementary reading I was asked to comment on a rather lovely quotation from Sir Isaac Newton, something he said as an old man:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I was supposed to comment on this in 250 words. I could only manage 169.

Newton makes this statement because all of his scientific and mathematical pursuits were a matter to him of great pleasure. It was never his intention to make a great name for himself. He did not particularly enjoy the acclaim of his peers or public, or appreciate being made the center of controversy. All he really wanted was to be left alone to pursue his investigations, which for him were a matter of play. The smooth pebbles and pretty shells he refers to are the objects of his desire, which is discovery, and discovery undertaken only for its own sake. He understood only too well that the answering of a singe question could only lead to other questions being asked. Each new discovery was like a water molecule in the vastness of the ocean. He believed that truth existed and that the work he did contributed to mankind's knowledge of that truth, but he also recognized its infinitude and in fact I would think that he was pleased by it.

If I got nothing else out of the exercise at least I got this one lovely quote, which presents me with another way of looking at the world.