An Aria

by Mag Gabbert, on optimism

The gas station speakers blast La Traviata when I stop to fill up. It’s nightfall. Downtown’s buildings glow neon against periwinkle shadows. Before you tell me this isn’t romantic, I know: studies have shown that opera music makes a space less desirable, that it might coax transient people and loiterers to move on.

But I can’t stop thinking about a book I read recently; how, in it, a scientist argued that music itself is a miraculous phenomenon. Because, he wrote, it’s hard to explain the way we hear songs—not just as individual chords and notes, but something whole. I wonder, might this show that we can override instincts, that we can resist the brain’s urge to pick apart every piece, asking, “which among these doesn’t belong?”