Life & Music: A reminder from Alan Watts

“In music, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest… and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord…”

— Alan Watts (from “Life and Music”)

“In music, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the fastest — and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord. “So, that’s the end!”

But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.

We’ve got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression.

It’s all graded and what we do is we put the child into this corridor of this grading system, with a kind of, “come on kitty, kitty, kitty…”

And now you go to kindergarten. And that’s a great thing because when you finish that, you’ll get into first grade. And then, “come on!”

First grade leads to second grade and so on… and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school. And it’s revving up, the thing is coming! And then you’re gonna go to college… and by Jove, you’re gonna get into graduate school!

And when you’re through with graduate school, you go out and join the world. And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance. And they’ve got that quota to make… and you’ve gotta make that.

And all the time, the thing is coming… It’s coming! It’s coming! That great thing! The success you’re working for…

Then, when you wake up one day, about 40 years old, you say, “My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!”

But you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s was hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax.

They made you miss everything.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.

But, we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played…”  

— Alan Watts (from “Life and Music”)