Shall beauty transcend?

Below is an abbreviated version of a Washington post newspaper story. I picked out the parts that seemed most powerful to me. None of the facts are altered. If you want to read the full story, follow this link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

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It is 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. The location is El’Efant Plaza. A mall that is connected to a subway, located in downtown Washington D.C. A violinist enters the building. He picks a wall to stand by, pulls out his violin, throws a few dollars into his case, pivots the case around to his audience, and begins playing. 1,097 people will pass by in the next 43 minuets.

No one knows this, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators is one of the finest classical musicians in the world. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The fiddler’s name is Joshua Bell. To some of you this name may mean nothing, to others your eyes might gleam with a twinge of excitement and awe. For those of you who don’t know let me give you a brief summary…

Bell had his first music lessons when he was 4 years old. His parents discovered him stringing rubber bands across his dresser drawers, and picking out classical pieces by moving the drawers in and out to vary the pitch. His parents thought formal training might be a good idea. He is considered a child prodigy.

Now, at age39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Bell has filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. At the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he played to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. When he performs, he walks out to a standing O. Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." He is undisputedly the greatest violinists alive today, and in the top ten of all time.

The violin he plays has a history of its own, and is considered to be one of the finest violins ever crafted. It’s price tag is about $3.5 million.

The piece the he opens with is Bach's "Chaconne". It is considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann said this about the piece: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." This piece and others that Bell later played are masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

Now that you have been properly introduced, let me remind you of the setting; a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators.

And so the master begins playing, throwing his pearls away, whether it is to swine or appreciative listeners is yet to be decided. Three minutes role by, sixty-three people have passed the musician before someone takes notice. A man gives Joshua Bell a glance, acknowledges his existence, and continues to walk. It may not have been much, but it was more than any of the other sixty-three people gave.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

Even at his accelerated pace, even at the height of emotion, with the most beautiful and joyous melodies ever to be laid upon human ears, the most fluid and graceful movements of the fiddler; only seven stopped to take notice. So apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly…you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost. Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell. The behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent, however. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Calvin Myint. Happened to be one of the people who passed by the musician that day. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. When interview by a reporter a few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"
"About four feet away."
"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years. Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look. People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"

British author John Lane comments: "This is about having the wrong priorities. If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?”

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Then what else are we missing? My pastor posed this question today.

“If the Kingdom of God was all around us, how would we recognize it? Or would we even recognize it at all?”