UW Honors Portfolio

On this page, honors students share an analogy which explains their philosophy of life. I say that life is like music.

Music is the architecture of sounds. It is poetry glorified by mathematics. It is, if we are to believe Tolkien, the language by which God created the world.

The world and its story are musical. All things, from the smallest particle to the largest galaxy, move in cycles and waves, like the repeating oscillations that are musical pitch. We live in the midst of these repeating cycles, like the days and months and years. These cycles, built on one another, make harmony, gradually shifting harmony, the music of the spheres–not literal sound, as the ancients believed, but a harmony of light and mathematics.

But music is more than just pitch, or harmony, or even predictably changing pitch and harmony. If I played three chords F, G, C over and over again, that would not be music, at least not good music. It would be meaningless because it is inherently predictable; it does not go anywhere interesting; it has no end, no purpose. Music needs a story, and for the universe, that story is history.

People say that history repeats itself, but actually it only imitates itself. There are themes and motives that come back over and over again in the lives of men and nations–youth and age, love and pain, birth and death and resurrection–but like snowflakes they never appear exactly the same way, nor are they predictable.

Theme and variation are what make music meaningful. If things were always repeated exactly the same, the listeners would get bored of the music, but if it was completely different from everything they had heard before, they would not understand it. In the same way, we cannot help but imitate the past, but we can improve on it.

My life is a symphony. It has a similar form to symphonies of the past, yet it is also unique. It has repeating themes, which some might call habits, that continue to change and recombine in unprecedented ways. I am the main singer in my symphony, yet others also have, had, and will have their parts–mother and father, friends, colleagues, wife, and children. And at the same time, I am participating in their symphonies, both of which are accompanied by the orchestra of the universe, the harmonies of the spheres, the rhythms of time. I have called this symphony mine, and yet I am not the one who wrote it, although sometimes I am allowed to help with the composing and conducting.