Favorite Musical Book Quotes?

Here's another musical quote from "The Occult" by Colin Wilson:

It can, I think, be seen that James's experience of 'expanding horizons of fact' is nothing less than a sudden total awakening of Faculty X, which is, as I have said, a sense of the objective reality of other times and places, instead of the usual subjective worm's-eye view in which we are trapped all our lives. It is like standing on a mountain-top and seeing far more than you are able to see from the valley. In fact, Priestley's image of the mist rising on the Grand Canyon expresses it admirably. It can be understood why Graves felt he 'knew everything' while this glimpse lasted. Equally interesting is the fact that, although James believes that such experiences are bound to be momentary, Graves's lasted for about twenty-four hours. This is of immense importance. For the experience that suddenly happened to Graves was a kind of mental counterpart of Home's ability to float in the air. And it lasted. If it could last for a day, there is no reason why it should not last all the time.

It is necessary to try to gain further insight into the nature of this 'glimpse.' It is quite clearly what the mystics have always talked about. And the mystics have asserted that it is 'ineffable,' that it cannot be talked about or analysed. In this book we have gone a long way towards analysing it, and perhaps may go further still.

Warner Allen, in his interesting book The Timeless Moment, describes how he experienced the fundamental mystical 'glimpse':

When the writer was on the threshold of fifty, it occurred to him as it must have occurred to many another ordinary journalist, no less hostile to the apparent sloppiness of fashionable mysticism than he was, that he had lived for nearly half a century without discerning in life any pattern of rational purpose. His views on the matter might have been roughly summed up in a vague notion that the universe was shrouded in impenetrable darkness by the powers of Life and Death, for fear life should lose its savour as a brave adventure, if the mystery of death and suffering was solved, and uncertainty was exchanged for the assurance of future beatitude. A curiously vivid dream shook his faith in this tentative explanation of human ignorance...This quest of truth led through paths of unforeseen darkness and danger, but within a year...an answer came.

It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Queen's Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when 'the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.' The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr. T.S. Eliot calls 'the intersection of the timeless moment' [with time] must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semi-quavers. When, long after, I analysed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts: first, the mysterious event itself, which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second; this I learned afterwards from Santa Teresa to call the Union with God; then Illumination, a wordless stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with iridescence the spray above a waterfall – a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience; lastly, Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex of Experience, as it were, embalmed in thought-forms and words.

That this is the experience William James is talking about becomes almost certain when we consider James's preliminary remark that his own experiences were extremely brief: 'In one instance I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether the interlocutor noticed any abstraction.' Allen's second phase – the wordless stream of complex feelings that was 'swollen by tributaries of associated Experience' – makes it clear that this is that outward expansion of associations described by James. In short, the pleasure and excitement of the music energised Warner Allen's mind until suddenly, like a spark flying upward, it achieved 'insight,' the bird's-eye view.

This is the mystical experience that Chesterton described as a feeling of 'absurd good news,' the joy that burst on Faust as he heard the Easter bells, the overwhelming feeling of insight that often accompanies the sexual orgasm.

Charlotte Bronte describes a similar glimpse in Shirley, a sudden ecstatic 'vision of life as she wishes it. No – not as she wishes it; she has not time to wish: the swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling its splendour faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings.' Here, the language is so similar to James's that one could almost believe he was unconsciously quoting it.

Here's hoping that you have glimpses of other times and places that may help you in your life! Thanks for reading!

Another musical quote from "The Occult" by Colin Wilson incoming!

I have myself experienced the sense of 'power over time' on two occasions. On the first of these, I was working in a hospital in a job that bored me. Weeks of inactivity and minor irritations had reduced me to a passive state where I felt almost incapable of concentration. At this time I was deeply interested in Nijinsky (who had died recently), particularly in his attempt to create a new kind of choreography with tense, heiratic movements. When I was alone I used to practise ballet exercises; and if there was suitable music on the radio I would experiment with these Nijinsky movements.' One evening, the 'Liebestod' from Tristan came on; its unexpectedness produced a shock of pleasure and concentration. I made an effort to retain this concentration; it seemed as difficult as balancing on one toe, but the movement helped. As my attention began to waver, the climax of the 'Liebestod' induced a new effort of concentration, and quite suddenly, for a space of a second or two, I had a sense of absolute and total control over time, as if I could order it to stand still. The past ceased to be something that receded from me, like the scenery going past a train; it felt as if I could relive it as easily as I could put on a gramophone record for a second time. The metabolic processes of the body seemed to be as much within my control as the muscles in my arms and legs.

The second occasion was related to the first in that I was again listening to Tristan in the gods at Covent Garden. The sheer length of the opera ends by inducing a sense of freedom, for the unwonted concentration leads to 'second wind.' It was in this second wind that I decided to try to re-create the sensation of timelessness; accordingly, I again began to make an all-out effort of concentration in the last ten minutes. This time there was no need for physical movement to reinforce the effort; after a few moments there was again the sensation of floating, or being suspended, and again the feeling that I could arrest the time- processes of the body.

This should make dear why I am inclined to reject the notion of a three-dimensional time. Is not Priestley making the same mistake as Dunne in treating time as though it were a real entity, like the sea, when in fact it is a process, like a wave in the sea? And as a process, it is a function of what I have, for convenience, agreed to call 'the astral body,' to distinguish the living, conscious 'me' from the physical shell that will eventually die.

What happened in these two cases should be fairly clear. Instead of allowing the aesthetic experience to operate upon passive sensibilities, I made an effort to accelerate the process by concentration. This may seem the wrong attitude: for surely doesn't music, like poetry, require a wide-open attitude, Keats's 'negative capability'? But phenomenologists know that this is an error. All perception is an intentional act, even if we are not consciously aware of it. If you relax too much, as in watching television, you begin to feel bored and depressed. I convulsed the muscle of concentration in an all-out effort, and the result was a glimpse of the kind of control over the body that will be possible at the next stage of human evolution.

This, incidentally, can be done at any time, without preparation (although it is a good idea to try it early in the day, when you are feeling fresh). By way of checking this, I just broke off my writing and looked at a coloured picture in a Country Life volume on England. It showed a half-ruined monastery against a background of Yorkshire hills. To my ordinary, 'un-boosted' perception, it was just a picture that produced little or no response. I half closed my eyes and concentrated hard, as if preparing for some enormous effort; there was an instant shock of response to the picture, a sense of brooding meaning, as if the hills and the sky were saying something. It remained when I relaxed again.

And if you've gotten this far, thanks for reading!

I have finished "The Occult" by Colin Wilson and have picked up the sequel "Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years' Research Into The Paranormal". Here is the very introduction that also delves into some discussion of music.

Introduction to the New Edition

This is my most important non-fiction book.

It was first published in 1988, and unites two main currents in my thinking: the ‘existentialist’ ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed from my study of ‘the occult’.

Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books— among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another ‘occult’ book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write another book about ‘the occult’. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made.

Thirty years earlier, in 1956, my first book The Outsider had appeared, and brought me an overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I must begin by trying to explain them.

Ever since childhood, I had been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how we can want something badly, and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it. I had noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy; yet a few hours after receiving it, I was already beginning to ‘take it for granted’, and even to find it slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays — how eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I became bored with them. I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week-long August holiday, I went to a church bazaar, and bought for a few pence some volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained ‘courses’ on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, botany and chemistry, to philosophy and zoology. I had been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived the preposterous idea of trying to summarize all the scientific knowledge of the world in one single notebook. I gave it the grandiose title of ‘A Manual of General Science’, and wrote steadily throughout that August holiday, filling four notebooks with my round, schoolboy handwriting. And I noticed that I never became bored. Learning — and writing — about geology, biology, and philosophy — from Practical Knowledge for All — kept me happier than I had ever been in my life, and I continued writing the book over Christmas, when I began the seventh volume — devoted to mathematics. All the time I was writing this book, I had an almost drunken sensation of the sheer immensity of the world of ideas, which seemed to stretch, like some marvellous unknown country, to a limitless horizon. Every day, when I began writing, I felt like a traveller preparing to discover new lakes and forests and mountain ranges. I felt sorry for the other boys at school, who were ignorant of this magical kingdom where I spent my evenings and weekends. I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose. Unfortunately, when I had finished the book, the problem of boredom returned, for I had no idea of what to do next. I spent one long school holiday trying to read all the plays of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries — Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the rest. During another holiday I read works by all the major Russian writers — Aksakov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. During yet another, I studied the history of art, and discovered Van Gogh and Cézanne. Yet because I was merely reading, and not writing about them, even this left me bored and dissatisfied.

When I was sixteen I came upon another important clue. It was soon after the end of the war, and a British publisher had started to reissue the novels of Dostoevsky. I bought Crime and Punishment with my pocket money. In the Translator’s Preface, I read Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail describing how he — and other condemned revolutionaries — were taken out on the Semyonovsky Square to be shot.

They barked orders over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, to bid them farewell. Suddenly, the troops beat a tattoo, and we were unbound, brought back to the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty … had spared our lives.

One of his fellow prisoners went insane. It struck me that if Dostoevsky had been offered his pardon on condition that he promised never to be bored for the rest of his life, he would have accepted gladly, and been quite certain that it should be possible — indeed, that it should be easy. And it seemed to me that he would obviously be correct. Surely, someone who had been through such a crisis would only have to remember being in front of the firing squad in order to be ecstatically happy?

In fact, it was this episode — and the years in Siberia that followed — that turned Dostoevsky into a great writer. Before he was arrested, he was a good but minor writer — in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol — but as a human being he was touchy and self-obsessed to the point of paranoia. His arrest — and long imprisonment in Siberia — made him aware that even to be alive is in itself a cause for rejoicing. The result of his new insight is expressed in a passage in Crime and Punishment, where the hero is afraid that he may be executed for his murder of an old woman, and thinks: ‘If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die at once.’ He had seen that ‘life failure’ — to be bored, miserable, tortured by guilt — is a form of childish spoiltness.

In my mid-teens, my problem was not simply boredom with my working-class existence (my father was a boot- and shoe-worker who earned about £3 a week). It was a longing to escape from it and to retreat into that magical world of the mind that I had discovered when writing the ‘Manual of General Science’. This was intensified by my discovery — through Practical Knowledge for All — of the realm of English poetry. I left school when I was sixteen, and for a few months worked in a factory, while I prepared to take the mathematics exam a second time. Factory work made me so miserable that I spent my evenings and weekends reading poetry — all kinds of poetry, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. I quickly discovered that, after half an hour immersed in the world of Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth, my rage and despair had turned into a gentle sense of melancholy, which was slowly transformed into a sense of happiness and optimism, as if I was floating above the world, looking down on it like a bird. When, in the writings of Richard Wagner, I later came across the phrase: ‘art, that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate’, I understood instantly what he meant.

The only problem with this state of mind, the ‘bird’s-eye view’, was that it was made twice as difficult to go back to work the following morning and accept the ‘worm’s-eye view’ of boredom and triviality. Years later, when I read Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, I recognize my own problem in the episode where young Hanno Buddenbrook goes to the opera to see Wagner’s Lohengrin, and is transported into ecstasy, so that he feels he is walking on clouds. But when, the next morning, he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before.

It then seemed to me that the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the power to change the world and our own lives. But such moments are brief. For most of the time we experience the sense of being victims of circumstance, like dead leaves carried along by a river, with no ability to choose our course. And when circumstances become especially difficult, it is easy to imagine that fate will afflict us with a series of misfortunes, like Job, that will destroy all our security and leave us completely helpless.

As I read my favourite writers — Plato, Hoffmann, Shelley, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot — or listened to the music of Beethoven, or looked at the paintings of Van Gogh, it seemed to me that all shared an awareness of this problem. Plato said that the universe is divided into a world of being and a world of becoming. The world of ‘becoming’ is this everyday world of matter, of endless change, in which we are trapped. The world of ‘being’ is the world of intellect and ideas, the world of truth and values that lies hidden behind the facade of the material world. As he prepares to commit suicide, Socrates declares that the philosopher spends his life trying to live in the world of true being, and that therefore he should welcome death, which finally frees us from the endless distractions of the world of mere ‘becoming’. This, I realized, was why so many romantics were fascinated with death. Yet I still found the idea of death stupid and repellent. It was an attempt to escape from reality. And the moments of ecstasy, of ‘bird’s-eye vision’, seemed to promise that life itself could be lived on a level of continuous joy and affirmation.

When, in my late teens, I began to write a novel, it was inevitable that it should be about this problem of the bird’s-eye view and the worm’s-eye view.

Thanks for reading!