Redemption Songs

Of course, the only correct answer to the question “If you could take only a single book with you to a desert island, what would it be?” is Robert Burton’s magpie nest of learning, wisdom, nonsense and gorgeous prose, The Anatomy of Melancholy. I discovered it 35 years ago by way of digression, appropriately enough, while reading Tristram Shandy, the author of which, Laurence Sterne, helped himself to hefty slabs of Burton while composing his own sport of nature. Burton’s admirers include Samuel Johnson, John Keats and Herman Melville.

I thought of Burton again yesterday while listening to music – Satie’s Gymnopedies. The linkage is not so unusual, for The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those rare books, a beautiful mess (Moby Dick is another, and so is Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria) in which a digression on virtually any subject, as in a good encyclopedia, could be inserted without damage to the surroundings. In fact, the joy of such books – Boswell’s Life of Johnson is another – is their elasticity. Only the world itself is more elastic.

Satie’s pieces for solo piano are haunting and sad. I remember how Louis Malle’s inclusion of Gymnopedies No.1 at the close of My Dinner with Andre, when Wallace Shawn pensively rides home from the restaurant, seemed so utterly appropriate in an otherwise music-free, talk-filled movie. I started thinking: Why is so much of the music I most enjoy listening to, that most engages me emotionally, melancholy? That’s a better word than depressing, which sounds, oddly, both too clinical and too melodramatic. Another CD I often listen to is Moon Beams by the Bill Evans Trio, the first album Evans cut after the death of his bassist, Scott La Faro. The music is anguished and beautiful. I’m not a musician. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I’m hearing, but I recognize its emotional impact

Who better to consult on such matters than Burton? I remembered that he wrote at length about the curative powers of music. After a little digging in my three-volume Everyman’s edition I located “Music a Remedy,” in which, after citing various nostrums “prescribed to exhilarate a sorrowful heart,” Burton offers a traditional frat-boy remedy: “a cup of strong drink, mirth, music, and merry company.” That’s not what I wanted to hear. After much entertaining discursiveness and many Latin tags, I struck gold: “Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy: it expels cares, alters their grieved minds, and easeth in an instant.”

Just now, after transcribing Burton’s words, I put on a compilation CD my oldest son burned for me last year. I knew just what I wanted to hear: the Johnny Cash/Joe Strummer cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Not that I felt so bad, but now I feel so much better.