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Excerpts from The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson
the exemplar of contemplation
Dear Reader, two whitsuns orbit the planet Uranus; one is called Puck, the other,
Bottom. They burn just above the swirling clouds of that giant planet, and with
the help of the planet's soft green light they illuminate all that dark corner
of the solar system. Basking in the green glow of this trio are a host of
worlds -- little worlds, to be sure, worlds no bigger (and many smaller) than the
asteriod Vesta -- but worlds, nevertheless, each of them encased in a clear
sphere of air like little villages in glass paperweights, and each of them a
culture and society unto itself. These worlds orbit in ellipses just outside the
narrow white bands of Uranus's rings; you might say that the band of worlds
forms a new ring in the planet's old girdle: the first dozen made of ice chunks
held in smooth planes, the newest made of an irregular string of soap bubbles,
filled with life. And what holds all these various worlds together, what is
their lingua franca? Music.
Our story, then, has its beginning -- one of its beginnings -- on one of
these worlds, the one called Holland. Holland is a somewhat irregular moonlet,
verdant in its lowlands, bare and moorish on its hilltops, which the locals call
tors. And in a heather-floored dell, near a pebble-bottomed stream, under one
of the tallest of these tors, there stands a lone cottage, sheltered by a single
yew tree. Over this cottage, in the spring of the year 3229, a clear dawn
pulsed with a pure light; a shaft of this dawn, a Puckish gleam, peered in the
cottage window, and inside Dent Ios awoke.
grimaldi
How does music mean? Not, you can be sure, in words. Music is a language untranslatable,
it is too direct, too subtle, too ... other for words. Music moves directly
from the inner ear to the lower brain stem, where our emotional lives are generated; and
nothing can stimulate the complex response that music does, except music itself.
So Dent sat on his knoll above the amphitheater and listened to Johannes Wright play, as
the late afternoon shaded into evening; he listened with all his mind focused, his flesh
quivering slightly in the cooling air. But you, dear Reader, cannot be told what
Dent heard. Words cannot describe this music.
Still, be not annoyed with me. All is not lost. The mind is always singing, and
somewhere inside each one of us pure music always flows. It flows from our bodies, the
biologic symphony -- heart pumping, blood pushing, breath filling and then leaving us; it
flows from the wave motion of the brain's electrochemical activity, as thoughts fire
synapses and engender their own pitch, timbre, duration, motion; it flows from the
spirit's transcendent reach, for the world beyond the world. The lush chords as you
fall out of dream, the chants you hum to get you through work, the melodies spinning
you off to sleep, they are greater than you know; listen to the embryo De Bruik within
you, Reader, listen at last! Hear your muisc -- hear it singing, in unforced
creation -- and know then that the music vibrating the twilight air on Grimaldi was
somewhat like that interior majesty.
--
The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson
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