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Quote by Daniel J. Levitin

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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

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Daniel J. Levitin

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“In a way,” Ava said, “we hardly know ourselves. Our senses are limited, our brains are biased, and our instruments are imprecise. Even all of visible matter is just a tiny fraction of what exists. Think about dark matter and dark energy. Think about all the hypotheses that haven’t been tested or can’t be tested in our lifetimes. Our bodies of knowledge are not only incomplete. They’re changing with every approximation, with every rigorous study. The more we learn, the more mysteries arise in the universe. To me, that’s the greatest realization. Discovering how insignificantly small we are in the cosmos while knowing we’re the cosmos too. We are what we’re looking for. We believe we’re so separate from everything, but we’re all connected in this moment, changing, always changing, but never capable enough to realize the immensity of existence itself. Our mammalian brains will never comprehend our interconnection to everything. We’re waves in an ocean and we don’t truly understand how deep that ocean can go.”

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“There's a pleasure in knowing the names of things. It's not about a need to categorise the world, sectioning it into little boxes. And clearly you don't have to know the names of rocks - or trees or plants or birds - in order to enjoy a landscape. But if you do have this information, something changes about the way you exist in that space. A named landscape thickens. It's to do with history and context but also, I think, with the quality of attention. To assign something its name, you need to take the time to pick out identifying features. You look for longer. And the more you know, the more things stop being a backdrop - blurred, indistinguishable, hurried over - and become somehow more present in the view, more insistently themselves, the way a familiar face stands out in a crowd.”

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Book:Notes from Deep Time
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