Distractions

So maybe you happened to see the cartoon in the June 22 New Yorker that showed a camper approaching a boy strumming a guitar on a log, gesturing warmly towards a gathering in the distance, and saying, “Come on, we’re all going to sit around the campfire and play our iPods.”

Or maybe you caught Dan Barry's brief cultural history of the Walkman in this past Sunday's New York Times, and perhaps you were struck by his claim that “today, of course, the ocean of humankind is cluttered with solitary islands of disengagement, thanks to the iPod, the iPhone, and so many other devices that say I.” Reading further, you learned that he feels that we are all "stuck in pause, still listening to glorious Pavarotti but also blocking out the aural serendipity of our existence – the chance conversations, the songbird trills, even the bleats of car horns.”

And so, with these images in your head, maybe you strapped your own IPod on before heading over to the Gilman School for this week's lambent morning walks with Cleo. And as the summer campers slowly coalesced, and as the sun rose over the woods to the east and poured down on the campus, you selected the Indiana University School of Music's rendering of Smetana's Die Moldau (absolutely free on ITunes, for reasons that will become clear below), and hit Play.

One of six symphonic poems written in the 1870s by the Czech composer, Die Moldau recreates, in evocative fashion, the course of the river Moldau (the Vltava, to the Czechs): gentle strings suggest the origin of the river, in its two springs; the river wanders by a peasant dance in south Bohemia; horns suggest the grandeur of Baroque castles; and a series of rippling motifs and a final crashing chord suggest its union with the mighty Elbe.

As you push Cleo around the roughly mile-long oval, does the lush music in your ears render you, as Barry would have it, an island of disengagement? Well, perhaps at least a bit. It occurs to you that the roughly mile-long oval upon which you walk is river-like, and you imagine passing through beautiful Cesky Krumlov as you round the baseball diamond. The football players in the middle distance acquire a sublime grace when their motions are set against the music. And the rush hour traffic on Northern Parkway simply melts away.

But then - it's at the 8:49 mark - a man coughs. And then he coughs again. And suddenly you are removed not only from the environment in which you move, but also from the music itself. Is the man one of the musicians? Is he an aging Bloomington resident, who may be in poor health? Is his wife embarrassed? And suddenly you are blocking out the aural serendipity of Smetana, and speculating about the man's search, in his jacket pockets, for a cough drop.

Divorced from the grass upon which you stand, distant from the Vltava, removed from the music that pours into your ears, far from Indiana, you suddenly realize exactly where you are: with a baby before you, on the 8th of July. And, thus returned, you begin all over again.