“If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn't it the case, in fact, that he'd been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music— for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature's way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful— except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity— than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews' foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist?”