In the same way that the metaphysicians - Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Jaspers - try to approach the unsayable and the unknowable, to break out of the limits of language and give at least an inkling, however illegitimate an inkling, of the nature of being and time (and I have to say that their attempts have never persuaded me, not that I'm a philosopher), music grapples with the sublime and the transcendent. In doing so it uses a language which, in its very lack of a proper semantics, its lack of definition, its continual striving to speak without actually speaking (or in the case of vocal music, saying so much more than is actually said), reaches outside itself more credibly than the jargon of the philosophers.

¶ 6:40 PM