Kelsey Steven - Music and the Divine

In Van Der Leeuw's book Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, music is discussed as being as close to the divine as humans can get. In one particular passage, he describes going to the opera and feeling the music so much, on a higher level than just the plot of the opera, that he felt he was almost seeing the truth of the cosmos and of life itself. When we hear music that fills our hearts to an almost breakable point, we feel that we are so close to understanding the truth but "it is all so infinitely distant, as distant as the stars. It is near to us, and yet we cannot grasp it." This made me think about how the spoken word can make us feel something so much more spiritual than the written word. Like the example Dr. Redick used in class (writing AAH on a piece of paper compared to actually yelling it), hearing words make us feel something on a more organic level similar to what music does for us. I can identify with Van Der Leeuw's claim because there are times when a piece of music will overwhelm me and I feel like there is something just out of reach that I can almost feel but ultimately cannot.