Listening to music is one of my great pleasures.

As a kid, I enjoyed early rock ‘n’ rollers like Elvis Presley (I especially loved “Heartbreak Hotel”), Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, Bill Haley & his Comets, and the Platters, and pop artists my parents listened to, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day. My parents bought the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, and that introduced me to Broadway scores. Soon we were also listening to West Side Story, Music Man, and Bye Bye Birdie.

I never felt I had to choose one type of music over others; I liked them all. At that time, songs from Broadway musicals were routinely recorded by pop, R & B, and even rock ‘n’ roll artists: Not only did Nat King Cole and Dean Martin sing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, so did Marvin Gaye—and on their album “Meet the Beatles!,” along with “I  Want to Hold Your Hand” and “All I Got to Do,” the Beatles sang “Till There Was You” from The Music Man.  The first time my sister, Wendy, played the album for me, I became a Beatles fan.

By the time I went to college, I also loved listening to folk artists, especially recent Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan, who became my idol. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was an anthem to me and to many others of my generation, with its haunting melody and poignant lyrics asking when, if ever, would we finally see the end of war and the end of racism, questions that we are still asking today. Every song Dylan recorded, whether about social issues (“The Times They Are a Changin’,” “Chimes of Freedom”) or love (“All I Really Want to Do”) or breaking up (“It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Don’t Think Twice,”) hit home, and I couldn’t wait to buy and listen to each new record (yes, vinyl!).

I also liked Motown. I loved listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, and Aretha Franklin, one of the most powerful singers I’ve ever heard.

Musically speaking, college was an ear-opener for me. I’d never listened to classical music before and suddenly I started hearing it all the time. My friends in the dorm left their doors open while they played recordings of music composed by people whose names I knew but whose work was unfamiliar to me: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms. There were also pieces by composers I’d never heard of: Bartok, Mahler, Ives, Hindemith. I loved the beauty of the music, the rich sounds of the instruments, and the mastery of the musicians.

In college I was also introduced to jazz pianists Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, and Mose Allison, each with a distinctive style of playing (and Mose Allison with a unique and recognizable singing style, too), to saxophonists Ben Webster and Charlie Parker, and trumpet player Miles Davis, each of whom also had a unique style that I enjoyed tremendously.

Since my college days I’ve continued listening to rock, jazz, and pop vocalists, singer-songwriters, and bands. Besides those I’ve already mentioned, my favorites include Art Tatum, Stanley Turrentine, Oscar Petersen, Stephane Grappelli, Billie Holliday, Barbara Cook, Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone, Etta James, Tony Bennett, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, Carly Simon, Simon & Garfunkel, Paul Simon (solo), Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and Elizabeth and the Catapult.

Some of the other classical composers whose works I’ve come to love are Liszt, Vivaldi, Paganini, Verdi, Puccini, Elgar, Copland, Gershwin, and Bernstein. My friend Tony Koltz introduced me to some contemporary classical composers whose work I like, too, including John Adams, Steven Reich, Osvaldo Goijov, and Frederic Rzewski.

Please write and tell me who your favorite recording artists and composers are.

In “Picasso Was Right,” I quoted Picasso’s beautifully articulated observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life from our souls.” After writing that blog, I found myself continuing to think about Picasso’s words, and that led me to think about what we mean when we talk about having a soul.

Of course, not everyone believes that human beings have souls. By definition, the soul is immortal. Some people believe we exist only as long as our physical bodies do, that each life starts with birth and ends with death. To believe that we have a soul, we have to believe there is a part of each of us that we cannot perceive through our senses and that has eternal life.

I am Jewish, and while I was growing up I never heard a rabbi, my parents, or other family members talk about the soul and eternal life. I learned the Ten Commandments and about loving strangers—foreigners—as myself. I also learned that it is important to live an ethical life.

My religious and familial education taught me that we should be compassionate and ethical because God is pleased when we treat other human beings respectfully and compassionately and displeased if we don’t. I’m not an expert on Jewish theology, so I don’t know if the soul is part of Jewish doctrine; I know only that I was never taught about it.

Yet as far back as I can remember, I knew the word soul and understood it to describe an immortal, invisible part of us that religious people believe in. I also knew that the soul is connected to God. Somehow it seemed true to me that each of us has a soul, even though no one had ever formally addressed the subject with me.

The first time I remember discussing the soul was in high school when we studied transcendentalism and read a poem and an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism, our teacher explained, was a philosophy that emphasized going beyond the physical world we generally think of as the “real world” and using our intuition to find spiritual truth. Emerson put it this way: “What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

The poem we read was “Brahma,” named after the Hindu god of creation:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Emerson’s poem expresses his belief in the immortality of the soul—that death is not really death (“If the red slayer think he slays, /Or if the slain think he is slain, /They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again”). It also expresses his belief in the unity of all things, even those that to our earthly perception appear to be opposites (shame and blame, the slayer and the slain, far or forgot and near, shadow and sunlight).

Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” defines the oversoul as the spirit that connects the soul of each of us to all other souls and to God. Although the term oversoul isn’t mentioned in “Brahma,” the concept is intrinsic to the poem’s meaning because it is the oversoul that unites all and everything and, like the individual souls it unites, it is eternal. The poem is written in the voice of this eternal unity.

From the moment I read “Brahma” and “The Over-Soul,” they spoke to me. I found Emerson’s writing inspiring. I loved the language of the poem and felt Emerson was expressing what I’d always felt: that there is something beyond the material world that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. Just as in my childhood I’d felt that each of us has a soul, on learning about the concept of the oversoul I felt that there is a spirit connecting all of us to each other and to God.

Indeed, I believe that the existence of the oversoul is the spiritual basis for the Old Testament’s instruction to love strangers as ourselves. Leviticus says we (the Jewish people) must do this because we were strangers—foreigners—in Egypt. This shared experience should make us kind and empathetic to all strangers. But the reason we need to love strangers as ourselves is not only because we have been strangers and know the need for kindness and empathy; we must love strangers as ourselves because on the deepest level we are part of each other: “Love the stranger as yourself” because the stranger is yourself.

Recently, I wrote about Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) in “Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hinduism, The Old Testament, and the Oversoul.” As I was straightening up my office to get ready for the new year, I came across a quote of Emerson’s about success that I’ve saved since I found it many years ago.  Reading it again, I was struck by how wise and helpful his words about success are, and I wanted to share them.

Emerson defined success as

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the
affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I have nothing to add except my admiration and appreciation.

Pablo Picasso said that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

When I read that quote, it immediately crystalized my experience of visual art. One of Cynthia’s and my friends has a beautiful collection of paintings and photographs on the walls of her home. Most of the time when we visit her, I glance at them as I pass by on my way from one room to another, and I’m pleased to see them, but when I take the time to look at them—really to see them and take them in—they have an uplifting effect on me. Their images and colors, their composition, the imagination and talent that the artists put into them, take me out of myself and, to use Picasso’s words, wash the dust of daily life off my soul.

That’s why I love going to art museums. I can walk into the museum thinking about my to-do list or an issue I’ve encountered in my writing or editing or worrying about a problem, and as I look at the art, I transcend whatever I’ve been thinking about and am transported to another place where, captured and captivated by the art, I experience inner peace. I find that a visit to an art museum for an hour or two is transformative, not just for the time that I spend there, but for hours after I’ve left.

I don’t like all art; I like art that is aesthetically appealing to me or intriguing and provocative, art that takes great skill to create and/or that comes from an original idea that I find worth thinking about. Often art that I like surprises me; often it moves and inspires me; often it makes me stand in front of it in awe of its beauty or thinking about what inspired the artist to create it and what meaning I see in it.

In 2015, Cynthia and I took my mother, who had just turned 93, to two art museums on two successive Saturdays. In the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, we saw paintings by Whistler, Gaugin, Braque, Picasso, and Van Gogh.  In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we saw contemporary and ancient Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian art, and an incredible work by the late Chris Burden, who recreated a version of the dirigible originally built by Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1901.  Santos-Dumon’s dirigible was the first one that worked, and it flew around the Eiffel Tower.  Burden’s dirigible flew in a 60-foot orbit in the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA.

My mother loved seeing the paintings and photographs, and she especially loved watching Burden’s dirigible fly around the large space that seemed tailor-made for it. It was wonderful for Cynthia and me to see her joyful experience of the art. She walked slowly with her walker, stopping in front of each painting and photograph, taking her time to appreciate it. Often she stayed in front of a piece for a long time, letting it work its magic on her. Standing among the group of museumgoers in the Resnick Pavilion, she was entranced as she watched Burden’s dirigible in flight.

Afterwards, on both Saturdays, she told us how much she enjoyed seeing the art. Not weighed down by her everyday concerns and challenges, she glowed. Her smile as she thanked us for taking her to the museums was youthful and ageless. At 93, she embodied Picasso’s powerful observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

I love mystery novels. In fact, there are times that I put all other reading aside and read them compulsively, one after another, until I’m satiated. You might even say that I’m addicted to mysteries the way some people are addicted to chocolate or ice cream.

I’ve thought about why I like mysteries so much, and I’ve come up with a few answers. I like the puzzle aspect of a good mystery—trying to figure out who did it before the author reveals it. I start putting clues together from page one and feel a great sense of validation when I’m right about the solution and only a minor disappointment if I’m wrong. I also like the characters, world, and mood of well-written mysteries. Perhaps most of all, I like experiencing the suspense and, ultimately, the feeling that justice has triumphed when the villain is found out and punished (would that it were always so in life).

As with many other mystery buffs, my favorite classic mystery writer is Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote seven-and-a-half novels that, along with the Sam Spade mysteries of his predecessor Dashiell Hammett, established the hard-boiled detective as a staple in mystery fiction. I’ve read all of Chandler’s novels several times, except Poodle Springs, his unfinished novel, which I read only once (it’s disappointing as well as unfinished; contemporary mystery writer Robert Parker has completed a version that’s been well received and that I’m looking forward to reading). Continue reading →