via text message, 2/28/21.

Me: “Sometimes listening to Bill Evans I get a flash that those 12-step people are right, like there’s something out there much, much bigger than me.”

MMcC: “Oh yeah. For sure. I have more to say about that than I can text.”

MMcC: “Some things are really only knowable because of him.”

Me: “It’s amazing. I’ve been listening to him on Pandora all morning, and, you know, they won’t stick to a single artist, so it’s a lot of piano jazz trios, and every time they flip from him to someone else or back it’s like a night and day difference. I was having a daydream, what if I could go back to being about 12 years old, and I thought, I’d probably ask my parents to get me a bunch of Bill Evans records. And then I thought, could 12-year-old me even begin to really appreciate his music? And that’s when I realize, I’m not sure 50-year-old me is capable of really appreciating his music. He just really seemed keyed into something huge and ineffable. I only get flashes of it, and mostly it comes in the form of a flash of total incomprehensibility, a big blank spot where it seems like something is that I can’t see.”

Me: “When I was younger, I read a lot of existentialism at much too young an age, which probably is what’s most directly responsible for my depressive streak. But when I was in college, a friend of mine said, “You have to read Sartre’s ‘Nausea’. It’s the only book by any one of those guys where they propose an answer.” So I checked it out, and it’s typical existentialism, entirely about a guy slowly becoming alienated from everything he thought he cared about. But in the end, just when life finally seems completely futile, he hears some old jazz and suddenly makes a human connection with it, with this pianist he’s never met hunched over in a sweaty studio thousands of miles away. And sometimes I think, you know, much as I love music, that’s kind of a facile thing to assign that kind of meaning to. But then, I have these moments like right before I texted you, with guys like Evans, and, Sartre did get it. He got it enough to write the only book in all of existentialist literature that doesn’t end in complete hopelessness about it.”

EDIT, May 23 2022: Much later, I had a thought related to this. Those 12-step folks talk about faith in a higher power, and I always assumed the higher power was the most important part of the equation. But it struck me the other day, maybe the important thing is just putting faith in something, exercising faith, and the higher power idea is just a focal point. Maybe the point is not to believe there’s something bigger than you, but, to take something on faith. But that’s a topic for a whole other blog post.

Originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity.