So, I had to write this essay for my English Composition class. I think it's worth reading.

Music, Who Am I?

It was all Socrates’ fault. He said that one can tell who a person is by what they listen to. I desperately wanted to know who I was, and I was determined to discover the truth is this assertion.

I remembered how on the last days before my three most recent birthdays I had watched the hours end, one by one. It was like trying to hold the waves as the river dragged me onward. Then, shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I heard the song “From a Distance” played by flutist James Galway. I instantly associated it with growing up, and the song became a source of steady hope and my window through which I looked back at my past and forward into my future. On the last day before my seventeenth birthday, I thought of that song and all it was to me; I did not count the hours.

I recognized this as proof that music did indeed shape me, perhaps even who I was. I decided to test Socrates. I don’t know who I, a stupid American teenager, thought I was to challenge the unquestioned wisdom of an ancient Greek philosopher.

For one month I did not listen to music. I hoped I would discover my essence, uninfluenced by music. In the silence, I became more perceptive of sound, and as my ears sharpened, I grew to rely on them more than any other sense. A strong connection developed between what I hear and how I consider my life and surroundings.

I became acutely aware of the evils of the world, perhaps because I was listening more than ever before. The world struck me as horrific, resonant with hatred and deception. My friends were disappointing me; my parents expected me to make choices I was not ready for, and I was hungering for something I hardly believed in. The chaos of others’ voices and my own faults strangled me. My mind was jarred with raucous noise. With increasing panic I struggled to understand it all- society, immorality, people. Yet I did not even know how to perceive the world. Truth and falsity are too tangled. What was I to do? How was I to react? Below all this was a throbbing hope that there might be a universal truth to summarize, unite and explain all people, including myself.

Also at that time, I found everyone wanted me to be happy and nice. It was like a sheet of smoky glass surrounded me. People only saw of me what they wanted. When I did not smile, they would laugh and say, “Smile! The sun is shining.” They did not listen to what I was trying to say. I would flounder for any answer to their questions and hope they would hear the hypocrisy in my voice as I said something I did not believe. But I was saying what they wanted to hear, nice things lit by the sparkle of an imaginary sun. Why did they expect me to be so happy and nice? Did they think that by being so, they could pretend the world was a good place and life easy?

As another month began, I decided to listen to music for one hour in the morning and one hour at night. One Saturday morning, I chose Shostakovich’s 8^th Symphony.

I listen.

The music is wild, bizarre, unlike anything I ever heard before. Like water might feel as it spreads across the ground where it has been spilt free from its container, so I feel my mind expanding, daring to look into horizons I had never thought possible. I try to do something while I listen, but I cannot. My entire mind is consumed by the symphony. The instant I am not alert, the music will leaves me miles behind and become incomprehensible. I close my eyes, and I see colors, brilliant colors on opaque darkness; they seem to mean nothing, only visual translations of the sound. Then I realize the darkness is my mind; the colors are my thoughts. My thoughts are being blown up as they are given unbelievable expression in the music. The music explodes in the darkness, challenging, mounting, bursting, shattering. Breaks. Heals. Breaks again. Is meant to be broken. The bandage was false. My thoughts are all fragments, dancing apart like galaxies, held together by sound.

The music begins to translate itself into the language of my mind. I understand. The music is an analogy of society, immorality, people. It is a rhythmic explanation of all the inconsistencies and faults of mankind. Within this symbolism, I find I am a microcosm of the wild, bizarreness of life and the human experience. We are each worlds of unanswered questions; we are each symphonies. All people together create the chaos portrayed in this symphony.

The music grows to be everything but what I hear. It is the patters before my eyes. It is the swaying surrounding my body. It is the clean, limitless air I breathe. Yet I cannot hear anything, just as I cannot see my face. The music is my mind. I am slipping from it. I am slipping into it. Music, who am I? The music is me. The music is the confusion in my own soul.

If I could breathe slower- If I could write faster- Every measure is a day’s emotions, rising, falling. Every wave is a passion. I skim at breakneck speed across the foamy crests with hardly a chance to see into the depths.

My eyes are closed. I do not see the sun. I feel motion. I am moving through my mind; I am climbing up into the past. Problems unsolved, like incomplete days, are sewn together. With rapid speed the music fills the voids in me of unanswered questions, from the surface of perception to the depths of my subconscious. The darkness is alive, and I am alive. I do not need the sun to show me that I am moving, that I exist.

I open my eyes. The music seeps from my consciousness. I have not moved an inch. The air of my room is polluted with demanding questions and haughty answers and expectations. I feel a queasy uneasiness. When my eyes are open, I need the sun to see that I exist, but I do not know who exists. So I close my eyes.

And I listen.

I am turned inside out and shaken like an old rug. My essence is explodes into a thousand fragments that transform themselves into sound. All the confusion in me is surrounding me. Mental trauma, which once choked me at every turn of my mind, is now outside of me. The symphony is coming to a close. I watch the minutes end, one by one. I wait for one last discordant eruption. But the music is simple, vulnerable; what could it mean? I wonder at myself for understanding the dissonant sound but not being able to relate to a restful melody. My subconscious, concupiscent desires, despair, and perverted hopes talk to me from outside of me. They are far from me, and I realize I am free to sense the inner peace that I had almost forgotten to believe in. The answers and harmony I have been hungering for are being sung to me. I know how I am to respond to society and the faults of humanity. The symphony glides into a finish with poignant ease.

Music, who am I? I close my eyes, and I know. I am the question, the seeker. The music is my reason, my illumination.