655. “The Greatest Piece of Participatory Art Ever Created”

Love is hard to explain. When you fall in love with a person or a place or a thing, who can say why? A few years ago, I fell madly in love with a piece of music. This was during the COVID pandemic when there was still a lot of mask wearing, a lot of social isolation, a lot of death, but also glimmers of hope.

I am a sucker for hope. I went to a concert around Christmas time with my wife and some friends, and the music I heard that night jacked up my hope meter to eleven. It was a great feeling, especially when there was so much uncertainty and darkness, so much fear of the future. The older I get, the more I realize that fear of the future is essentially a default condition of humankind. One thing I've learned from interviewing historians over the years is that the historical outcomes that seem obvious today were not always obvious in the moment.

The rise or fall of a given empire or institution was rarely a foregone conclusion. If one or two decisions had gone another way, or one battle or marriage, or pregnancy, the outcome might have been different. But when you're standing in the present, it's hard to see where the future lies. If you sense there is an ill wind blowing, you assume it will keep blowing in the same direction, and that things will only get worse. So we make all sorts of predictions based on uncertainty and fear.

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