An Experiment with Truth

Filed under Music, Society | 22 June 2007 | No comments yet

A brilliant piece of writing, recently published in The Washington Post, provides rich insights into Life and Human behaviour.  (Thanks, Atanu, once again for sharing a gem!)  Entitled “Pearls before Breakfast”, it captures in vivid detail what happens when one of the world’s greatest musicians attempts to woo a rush-hour audience on their way to work, outside the Metro.  And, in doing so, it highlights every thing that’s wrong, and right, with our lives:

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript… From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

…In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

It’s a really long essay.  But it’s one worth reading.  Very slowly. 

And, once you’ve done that, take the time to ponder on it.  Ask yourself the questions that matter… the ones that make it relevant to your life…

How quickly does a human being get reduced to seeking external validation, even if he is a genius?  How is it that the only demographic that stood out was noted among children?  How did the shoe-shine woman “get it”, but the busy policy analyst did not?  Are we really making progress if lottery-ticket purchases demand more of our attention than sheer artistic beauty?

When is the last time you spoke louder on your cellphone because of that “infernal racket” in the background?  How many minutes of your precious time would you spend to “stop and stare”?  What would you do if you were at that Metro?

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