The Request

While you are a guest in my home I am going to ask you to do something for me: turn off all your electronic gadgets and noises. Leave them off until you leave my property. Then you may use them again if they still interest you. I will make this same request to everyone who visits my home.

I ask this not because I hate your music or your games or your pathological dependence on coarse electronic stimulation. I am simply listening to something much more interesting and much more beautiful; something which I believe to be critically important. And I would like to preserve my opportunity to do so. I have invested considerable resources to secure the freedom and solitude which makes this possible, and would ask you to respect that as willingly as you might respect a man's ticket to some entertainment spectacle. But mine is a very different sort of opportunity. I am inviting you to come along if you'd like, and you don't need a ticket. You shall, in fact, have the best seat in the house.

You would understand my position better if you could know what the years have brought my way. Moments which have been most instructive and most deeply enriching have often been centered around acoustic experience. It is difficult to describe such gifts with written language; one finds himself appealing to that same sense of experience in the reader rather than teaching about the encounter. How does one convey what is heard when one listens to a heartbeat? Or a whippoorwill's song? The wind in aspen leaves, or a distant train? I could make a very long paragraph here but it would be a tedious read for young readers. But the songs I have heard are like the whisperings of the muse, like nourishment to a starved sanity, and sometimes like the language God chooses to speak to my soul. What I have heard still echos in my mind; what I have not yet received I am straining all my self to hear.

While you are here you will know a kind of freedom which is increasingly unavailable. No one and nothing will tell your mind what thoughts to think. No carefully conceived advertisements will conduct your neurotransmitters to a particular state. No interruptions will lead you away from what your mind is constructing thought by thought. No coarse distractions will overwhelm the subtle summonings of natural intelligence. In this place you will hear things which will teach you how to listen and how to think.

Rob no one of this gift.

Welcome to my house.