There are some people who seem to hear music all their lives. I don't mean that they go through life humming, dancing to an unseen orchestra or listening to a different drummer. But I do mean that they seem to hear something the rest of us don't hear, some rhythm to living, some assurance to existence we can't comprehend.
I wouldn't call them saints. Saints or saintly people also hear sounds most of us don't, but their song seems to be more strident and more compelling. The people I'm talking about move through life as if most of it is a pleasure--even if it isn't. They smile, but they don't laugh uproariously. It's as if they don't need a lot of mirth, as if they are already assured of their ultimate blessing. They're a pleasure to be with, but they aren't a strain. They're not perfect, but on the other hand, they don't have many faults except a seemingly perpetual assurance.
Clergymen or women would say they are filled with grace, and I suppose that's as good a description as any. The only problem with this definition is that no one can quite define grace. All they know is that it is important to faith and understanding.
If I had to make a secular judgment, I'd say they hear some music I can't hear, or I haven't been able to hear very often.
The mystery, at least to me, is how this grace is bestowed upon them and why this music lasts all life long. For I don't think those who hear the music ever asked to have it played. It just seems to come to them unbidden.
As I say, I've often wished it would happen to me, that sometime this sense of singing, unbidden and unannounced, would suddenly fill me, much as is described in the English poet Siegfried Sassons' poem "Everybody Suddenly Burst Out Singing," a poem he wrote when World War I came to an end.
But only on rare occasions have I so been honored. These moments are singular and wonderful when they arrive. Not only are they really indescribable, they are different.
Sometimes they are a single day in which the sun shines, people smile, everyone and everything seems in tune and you can go to sleep at night feeling that this is the best of all possible worlds and you have been singularly blessed to have been in it.
Sometimes it's a whole week, sometimes only an hour when the world seems to be singing only to you. Each such occasion sticks in your memory, hauntingly so, making you wish you could recreate it at will.
Imagine what it would be like, though, if almost every day seemed that way, as if your whole life was a song you could enjoy without really having to sing it, as if it just played on and on like a never-ending compact disc.
I would expect that you would be transformed, not necessarily physically, but spiritually. But by that I don't necessarily mean a religious conversion. I think of it as different from being a born-again Christian, Moslem, Taoist or whatever. Somehow it seems to me it would be more universal than any religion could make it.
But as I've said, most of the time I don't hear the music. I have doubts; I get angry, often for no good reason; I do things I know are wrong and then regret them, and so on. Then I know I not only don't have the music playing for me, but don't know how to try to get it back again.
Which, of course, doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have it happen again. I'd like to learn how it is possible to live your life with such wonder, understanding, compassion, love and grace. I'd like to learn, but I don't know that it is possible.
I've only asked one person who I thought heard the music how she managed to live her life that way, in spite of adversity, in spite of things which would put most of us down, if not for the count, at least for a long time. Just as I thought, she just looked at me and smiled.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said. And I think she probably didn't. Because if you have to explain how you happen to be that way, you'd probably no longer hear the music. Not having to think about why the world seems to sing to you makes it possible to live in that splendid, self-assured, wonderful way that those who hear the music maintain.
It is a little like waiting for a halo to descend on your head. You won't know if it is there. Rather, you'll see it in the faces of those with whom you have to deal day after day. Their faces will be filled with a variety of emotions: wonder, envy, longing, surprise and maybe even admiration.
I keep looking in the faces of those around me, but so far noneof those emotions has showed up. But I'm going to keep looking, nonetheless.
If you think I've found it, if you think I am hearing the music, don't tell me. Let me be surprised. I'm sure I will be.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, February 26, 1997.
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