In the article “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.”, the author— Gene Weingarten— has the globally recognized violin player Joshua Bell play music in the subway during rush hour to see if anyone will stop and watch. To Weingarten’s surprise, nearly no one stops to watch and listen to Bell’s beautiful music. However, the more telling aspect of this story has to do with how Bell was not comfortable with being labeled as a musical genius. While Bell agrees that the word can be used to label many of the composers who wrote the work he regularly plays, Bell asserts that his skills are generally interpretive and lack the creative ingenuity behind many of the most celebrated musical pieces. Thus, when analyzing Bell and his playing, Weingarten particularly focuses on his interpretive skills and how Bell captures emotion as a narrative, which is his main focus when actually playing. This is how Bell interacts with his audience. Particularly, its by telling an interpretive, emotional story with each piece he plays and allowing the audience to experience this. This insight makes it all the more troubling that more people did not stop to watch Bell. With this in mind, Weingarten comes to the conclusion that the people passing by are ghosts and Bell is the only real person living in reality. The idea that the passing bystanders simply reject Bell and his emotions (those conveyed through his playing) is incredibly disturbing. It puts the world in this cold, detached light almost as if we are all ghosts in a graveyard.
This phenomenon has penetrated my mind since I was child and has always had a looming presence in the back of my head. I have always felt as if sometimes I’m the the only one. The one carrying the anxiety of the world on my shoulders. Anxiety has had a presence in my life from an early age. Often, it is extremely difficult for someone who doesn’t understand anxiety to notice someone who is struggling from it. In one sense, I do feel and have felt throughout my life as if I’m the only one living and everyone else is simply nothing, just ghosts living through the motions. Through my insight gained from Weingarten’s article, I have now grown even more worried. Humans have and continually will detach themselves from reality by immersing themselves in technology and so on. So the question arises, is the future of this world going to be characterized by this inability to care for anyone or anything? I do believe that we can stop this frightening trend, but significant strides need to be made in order to rekindle the human emotion in all of us.
Voices 