What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
- from “Leisure,” by W.H. Davies
Yesterday’s Play Me, I’m Yours post has inspired me to share my very favorite article with you. It is about an experiment to test people’s capacity for beauty, and it won a Pulitzer prize. It’s a long read…takes me about a half hour, but I highly recommend it if you have the time.
Essentially, The Washington Post wondered what would happen if you placed a world-famous musician playing renowned classical works into the context of DC’s morning subway rush hour. The musician was Joshua Bell and the location was L’Enfant Plaza in the DC Metro. Here are a few excerpts:
In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
…the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.
The song that Calvin Myint [a passerby who did not notice Bell] was listening to [on his iPod] was “Just Like Heaven,” by the British rock band The Cure. It’s a terrific song, actually…It’s about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of your eyes.
…John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
But not everyone was so distracted.
Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.
“Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”
“It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Furukawa says. “Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters!”
I wonder how different the situation would have been had they also asked Bell to play the evening rush, where people are theoretically less pressed for time and more receptive to breaking their routine to watch a street musician.
Seriously, don’t tl;dr this. It’s worth it. Read the full article.
