Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Suppose, for a moment, that I were deaf, and had been so from birth. Had heard no sound, ever, was not even capable of decoding vibrations through my body. And suppose someone came to me with the story of a man called Beethoven. I would have to accept the existence of Beethoven (unless I were of the extreme cast of mind that refuses to accept as truth anything I had not personally tested myself) and I could read of his life, see pictures of him and of his home, and the strange artifacts with which he surrounded himself. But what he did, the work to which he gave his life, would be completely physically unprovable to me. I could see reams of paper covered with incomprehensible symbols. I could see films of people waving their arms about, blowing into things, scraping strings fastened to wooden boxes with sticks, just as people see other people making signs across their bodies, standing up and sitting down and singing and kneeling in silence, but it would make no sense to me. Being me (assuming I still was me, which hardly seems likely given such a catastrophic lack) I would, I think, be inclined to take the existence of 'music' on faith; but I could certainly understand such a person deciding that there was no such thing, that it was all a vast game of 'let's pretend' whose rationale completely escaped me. Especially if there were many people like me who could not experience the thing directly. And this is how I think of God." -- smallship1, 2010-12-23