Most of us like music.  Many of us enjoy piano music.  Recently, I came across a book titled The Lost Pianos of Siberia.  It's an account of how, in the midst of the prisons and gulags that have filled Siberia over the centuries, pianos and the music a skilled pianist can produce on them, have endured.  It's a tale of the power of melody to move the human heart.

     And move the heart it does.  Regardless of how rational, unimaginative, or tone deaf we might suppose ourselves to be, most of us cannot help but be captivated by a richly composed and played piece of music.  Music seems to penetrate us in ways nothing else can.  It grabs us in the innermost workings of our hearts, stirring, evoking, and probing, tangling past, present, and future together in the contours and folds of our minds.  It speaks to us profoundly.

     We may wonder why we have ears, we may wonder why we are soulful and tune happy beings.  We may wonder why music is.  As we should.  Fragile beings we be, we grasp at the metaphysical implications of our existence as in a riddle, as in a mirror darkly:  we cannot easily discern the patterns of our deeper selves.

     Maybe that's why, in the face of music that opens our souls, we need a bigger explanation for ourselves than, well, ourselves.  Absent transcendence, why, really, are we here?