All day, we felt a strong need to listen to this particular song. It’s euphoric and joyful, with a chorus that rises to sublime heights. That’s not quite been our dominant mood over the last few hours, but the song is helping out our tentative inclinations to hope and courage. It is strengthening the best sides of our nature. Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there in us and makes it louder. By finding the right piece of music at the right time we’re adding an accompanying score to our lives that allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We can live according to what we actually need to feel.
At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...

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