Essays in Idleness

Musicians are perfectly useless people, or at least, they can be. (I am droning on about the “Useless Man” — or woman, to extend my flattery.) Of course they can be useful to someone, or to themselves when they seek fame or fortune. (I, perhaps alone in Western society, do not wish to flatter Taylor Swift.) Rather, I think, to be able to sing one’s part, and be a voice from the chorus of the Requiem, is surely to be living a blessed life.

The musician is also free to marry and to have children and (in one case I am aware of) to have beautiful daughters with curls, who can also sing. Whereas, not the priest, nor the monk, nor the serious literary artist, although some liberals dispute this. Bach, as we know, had many dozen children, and went through several wives. It did not seem to distract him from composition, just as Martin Luther did not distract him from his Catholicity.

We define philosophy very narrowly, or else not at all, and I would tend to contrast Bach, and Mozart for that matter, with Immanuel Kant. This is not to despise Kant absolutely, for he did deliver an insight, that it is wrong, perhaps categorically, to use another person purely as a means. In this respect he acknowledges our souls. But he abuses everyone, including God, in the course of making atheism the default position in modern Western thought.

By comparison, Johann Sebastian used music to explain the working of God through nature, and Wolfgang Amadeus was privy to the principle of life — to put this in another way. Whereas, the accountant of Königsberg, in the worst moments of his critical philosophies, comes closer to being an angel of death. (He makes up for this in the best moments of the Urteilskraft, however; in my unqualified opinion.)

From these examples alone one begins to see what I am getting at, in my account of the “Useless Man” (which is hardly original with me), and even how this man differs from Lao Tzu’s “man who achieves everything by doing nothing,” although I would stress the similarity. He also has this triumphant, Godly quality, in East or West.

It is the primary virtue of the Useless Man: that he cannot be used.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I do not like to link anything, but an exception must be made for this, “just in.” It is a brief documentary on the opposite of a riot. It was the Marian Congress, at Ottawa, in June 1947, when half-a-million “useless” men and women descended upon what was then a town of 100,000 — a few short decades ago, when Canada was a Christian country.