I Am a Strange Loop

And yet a quick Web search shows that the idea of a vegetarian lion is not all that rare (usually in fiction, admittedly, but not always). Indeed, such a lion, a female named “Little Tyke”, was apparently brought up as a pet near Seattle. For four years (so says the Web site), Little Tyke refused all meat offered her until finally her owners gave up trying and accepted her vegetarian ways and her joy at playing with lambs, chickens, and other beasts. Until her dying day, Little Tyke was a vegetarian lion. Will miracles never cease?

In any case, having a conscience — a sense of morality and of caring about doing “the right thing” towards other sentient beings — strikes me as the most natural and hopefully also the most reliable sign of consciousness in a being. Perhaps this simply boils down to how much one puts into practice the Golden Rule.

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

I have to admit that I have always intuitively felt there was another and quite different yardstick for measuring consciousness, although a most blurry and controversial one: musical taste. I certainly cannot explain or defend my own musical taste, and I know I would be getting myself into very deep, hot, and murky waters if I were to try, so I won’t even begin. I will, however, have to reveal a little bit of my musical taste in order to talk about Albert Schweitzer and his musical profundity.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a record of the first eight preludes and fugues of Book One of J. S. Bach’s monumental work, The Well-Tempered Clavier, as played on the piano by Glenn Gould. This was my first contact with the notion of “fugue”, and it had an electrifying effect on my young mind. For the next several years, every time I went into a record store, I would seek out other parts of The Well-Tempered Clavier on piano, for it was a genuine rarity those days (even on harpsichord, but especially on piano, which I preferred). Every time I found a new set of preludes and fugues from either volume, the act of putting the needle down in the grooves of the new record and listening to it for the first time was among the most exciting events in my life.

In my parents’ record collection, there was also a recording of several Bach organ works as performed by Albert Schweitzer, but it took me a long time to come around to giving it a try, because I feared it would be too “heavy”. But when I finally did, what I heard was incredibly moving and I became as addicted to it as I had ever been to The Well-Tempered Clavier. I then naturally expanded my search in record stores to include Bach organ works, but I soon discovered something that troubled me, which was that many performers took them very swiftly and jauntily, as if they were merely virtuoso exercises as opposed to profound statements about the human condition. Schweitzer’s playing was humble and simple, and it charmed me that he made mistakes now and then but simply went on unperturbedly (in no other recordings would one hear even a single mistake anywhere, which struck me as unnatural and even bizarre). It also happened, although I didn’t know it then, that these performances had all been recorded on a simple organ in the very church in the Alsatian village of Günsbach whose bells had pealed one bright spring morning, saving the lives of a bird or two, and transforming young Albert’s life, and therewith, the lives of thousands of people.

Dig that Profundity!

Over the years, Bach as played by Schweitzer became a deep part of me. I obtained several more recordings by him, all belonging to the same series, each one revealing new depths of a cosmic wisdom (perhaps that sounds grandiose, but to me it is exactly on the mark) that emanated from both composer and performer.

I was naturally filled with gratification when the popularity of my book Gödel, Escher, Bach linked my name in some fashion in the musical community with that of Bach (this was a true honor), and in Bach’s 300th birthyear, 1985, I had the pleasure of participating in several tricentennial celebrations, including a tiny one on his exact birthday that I organized in Ann Arbor for the members of a class I was teaching, plus a few friends, the highlight of which was the small firestorm unleashed when we lit all 300 candles on the giant birthday cake I had ordered.