Of Sound Mind and Body

Beethoven and Spalding Gray's searches for meaning

A quick note that this piece covers the topic of suicide.

A minor, but not insignificant, commentary on 2020 that I heard more than a few times last year: How significant that Beethoven’s 250th anniversary would, due to COVID-19, be dominated by the silence of concert halls. The implication here, of course, is that Beethoven’s deafness would have meant that the silence of the concert halls, emptied and closed, would have been analogous to his experience of a full concert hall, mid-symphony. 

The comparison is reductive, and likely inaccurate based on medical and musical scholarship in the intervening years. But the intention behind it carries an explanation, if not an excuse: Humans have always been prone to make sense out of the seemingly senseless. “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning,” Viktor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning (1946). But how is that meaning found? What happens if it isn’t found? And where does making sense of the pas…