A new edition of The Angel's Guardian is here! Here's an excerpt.
He put the letter on the table. “So many things come in and out of our lives. Most are mundane: bottles and dishes and cars. Comfy chairs and fine wine glasses.” He motioned at the one in her hand. “Airline tickets and shoes. They pass into and out of our consciousness like feathers or dust specks. We pay them almost no attention, if we pay attention to them at all. We have been brainwashed to be consumers: to consume everything and even everyone. Everything—every thing—is measured strictly by its utility: What good is it to us? And when we have finished with it—or the person—we throw it, or them, away.
“That is how almost everyone on Earth proceeds through life, and it is wrong. Our planet is literally baking to death because we choose to be consumers instead of appreciators.”
He gazed at L’Infinito. “Consider the violin. How mundane, don’t you think? Even one as grand as this one. They’re common! We give them to our kids to give them something to do. We pay for lessons and clap pleasantly at their recitals, if we can be bothered to attend them. When they graduate, we put their violins up for sale on eBay because they’ve been sitting in the attic for months, maybe years, gathering dust, unused and forgotten just like that half-empty bottle of drain cleaner in the back bathroom cabinet.”
Elizabeth thought of her own violin, unplayed now for more than a decade. It wasn’t hidden away; she still took regular, loving care of it; but she had long since forgotten how to play. She felt a deep pang of guilt even though she knew she had never treated her violin in the manner Isao was talking about.
He continued.
“It was an instrument of utility only, one meant to amuse one’s child, let’s say a daughter, which we treat as an object or thing as well. If we’re lucky, maybe that violin educed our little girl, taught her a little about herself. If we’re even luckier, perhaps even a little music came out of it. But it and the music were always things, meant to keep the other thing, the child, away from drugs and gangs, or perhaps to engender that elusive sense of pride we always longed to feel for her.
“Perhaps she shows some promise, no matter how small, and maybe she earns a scholarship to a music school of some kind, and we pat ourselves on our backs for our brilliant foresight. Off she trots to college, where she takes the classes and earns the grades. The violin in the thing-daughter’s possession is still nothing more than a tool: to earn good grades, perhaps to win a chair in a local orchestra or as a member of a bluegrass band her dormmates put together. The violin is a tool, a thing. And she is too. It’s how she has learned to view herself and the whole world; it’s how she interacts with herself and the whole world.
“And so she plays the violin, and those who listen to the melody proceeding from it use it, and even each individual note within it, as tools as well. The listeners consume the music and the notes; they consume the auditorium and the lights and the stage; they consume the two or three hours with their dates or spouses as a means of relaxation, or giving themselves a break from work, or as a means of garnering sexual favors later or smoothing over an argument they had before. They use all of it to assuage the gnawing sense that their lives are utterly meaningless. The daughter, the violin, the music, the orchestra, the auditorium and its stage and lights and chairs are consumed in order to gain the approval of the herd, to look cultured or distinguished, to be noticed, as is the fine drapery covering their backs. Tools, tools, and more tools. Tools inside of tools. Tools that spawn more tools. Forever! Do you see?”
Elizabeth nodded somberly.
“There are those—very few of us, yes, but we do exist—who live life completely differently. This—” he motioned emphatically at L’Infinito—“is not a tool. It isn’t a thing. It has its own spirit, its own soul, even its own consciousness. We—” he brought his hand to his chest and slapped it against it—“we give those things to it. We do. We love it as we love our own flesh and blood. And the music that comes from it? We don’t use it to get laid or to lower our blood pressure or to look cultured and cool to our peers. Those are violations! I’d go as far even to call them sins, because such choices do direct harm to our spirits, our souls. Do you see? Do you, Elizabeth?”
She nodded again, staring. It was a rare sight to see Isao Akimoto so impassioned and animated. She thought of making a joke, maybe asking what was in the wine, but stopped. She had agreed with every word he had spoken.
“Few on this Earth choose to live that way because it requires that they love, truly, and so to let life and those ‘things’ and people change them, impact them, evolve them, in a very real way to become them. ‘Things’ are not mundane to such people, no matter how common. Life as a result becomes the astonishing miracle it was always meant to be.”
Read more thoughts here
