Awe

In the movement “Scheherazade and the Men with Beards,” written to capture how women fight patriarchal oppression, Josefowicz’s high-pitched, rising notes of protest are countered by deeper, louder, domineering sounds from the strings—the voices of men condemning her alleged adultery, threatening honor-killing. These are the sounds of a universal life pattern, the struggle between the powerful who subjugate and the powerless trying to survive and find forms of resistance.

I feel agitated and on edge, made uneasy by the violence of power. Images move through my mind. An unexpected trip to the ER in the Sierra foothills—Rolf’s cancer had put him into a near coma. He was rushed to a small hospital, where he recovered, regaining blurry consciousness. During my stay, we walked the fluorescent-lit halls, passing two parents whose son was reeling from a psychotic break. Rolf weighing 148 pounds, walking with blue gown on, stooped, slowly moving in a sterile beige hall. Uncertain footsteps, scuffing thin white hospital-issued slippers. Light-hearted comments: “I guess I’m not what I used to be, am I? . . . I almost left that time.”

As the symphony arrives at its end, Scheherazade flees and finds sanctuary. Josefowicz’s playing is soft. It soars in places, and then ends in gentle, elongating notes of serenity. The struggle of a single outspoken, brilliant woman speaking truth to power with a gift for stories of awe is over. At the end of struggle and subjugation is peace, felt in Adams’s composition in slowing, appreciative sounds whose notes drift off into space. Out of the quiet of the performance’s end, the crowd roars. I sense tears and a fast rush of goose bumps.

After the show, I give Yumi a big hug in the lobby and head into a torrential downpour. Headlights stuck in traffic project beams of light that illuminate millions of drops of rain, all making their way from the sky to the ground and then vanishing in ricochets off the asphalt, dissipating in radiating rings of water molecules. People run to Ubers and cabs with programs and coats draped over their heads. Clad in slacks and dresses and high heels, they shout familiar sounds—aah, wow, whoa

, and woo-hoo. And laugh as they drive away.

I don’t know a soul around me. I go the wrong way trying to locate my hotel. I get drenched, embraced in torrents of rain, creating such luminous light filled with droplets on the streets. But I feel located in the world, surrounded by the blanket of the evening’s sound and the movements and shared rhythm of the people around me.

EIGHT SACRED GEOMETRIES How Our Awe for Visual Design Helps Us Understand the Wonders and Horrors of Life

A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy. . . . Art, and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.

• IRIS MURDOCH

Jurassic Park is a visual paean to the wonders of life. Its high-spirited narrative careers through encounters with overpowering nature—the waves of a tropical storm—big ideas—gene editing, chaos theory—dinosaurs, and, like so many of Steven Spielberg’s films, the moral beauty of children. In the movie these wonders are imperiled by capitalists seeking to commodify awe.