Claire's Horror

"When you are listening to the radio, you hear and see the eternal struggle between idea and phenomena, between eternity and time, between the divine and the human. Precisely, friend, samely as the radio blindly throws the world's most magnifiscent music during ten minutes through the most absurd places, through burguoise saloons and garrets, between manured people who is talking, eating, yawning or sleeping, just as it takes away the music's sensual beauty, it shatters it, it smears and tears it to shreds, and, however, it cannot kill completely its spirit; exactly the same does life acts, the so-called reality; with the magnific play of images it offers after Händel a dissertation on the way to disfigure the balances in the industrial enterprises, from lovely orchestral tunes it makes a disgusting muddle of sounds, it introduces its technique everywhere, its feverish actitivity, its miserable unculture, and its frivolity between thought and reality, between orchestra and ear. All life is like this, son, and we have to let it be, and if we are not donkeys, we laugh, besides. People of your class should not criticise radio nor life. It is preferable that you learn before listening. Learn to take seriously what is worthy of being taken seriously, and laugh out at the rest!" -Mozart to Harry on Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf