I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [155]
If you seriously believe, as I do and have been asserting for most of this book, that concepts are active symbols in a brain, and if furthermore you seriously believe that people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain (in other words, that each person that one knows is internally mirrored by a concept, albeit a very complicated one, in one’s brain), and if lastly you seriously believe that a self is also a concept, just an even more complicated one (namely, an “I”, a “personal gemma”, a rock-solid “marble”), then it is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this set of beliefs that your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I’s, other souls, the extent of each one depending on the degree to which you faithfully represent, and resonate with, the individual in question. I include the proviso “and resonate with” because one can’t just slip into any old soul, no more than one can slip into any old piece of clothing; some souls and some suits simply “fit” better than others do.
Chemistry and Its Lack
For me, the best illustration of the idea of better and worse fits or “resonances” between souls is musical taste. I will never forget what happened, thirty-some years ago, when a pianist friend praised Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto to the skies and insisted that I get to know it. This was an act of reciprocation for my having introduced to her, a few years earlier, one of the most stirring pieces of music I knew — Prokofiev’s third piano concerto. At that time, she had resonated to the last movement of the Prokofiev in an incredibly powerful way, a fact that seemed to signal that we were on much the same musical wavelength; therefore, I took her passionate endorsement of Bartók’s second violin concerto with great seriousness. To egg me on, she said that Bartók not only used her favorite chord from the Prokofiev over and over, but he used it better. Say no more! I instantly went out and bought a record of it. That evening, with high anticipation, I put it on and listened carefully. To my disappointment, I was utterly unaffected. This was very puzzling. I listened again. And then again. And again. And again. Over a couple of weeks, I must have listened to that highly-touted piece a dozen times if not two dozen, and yet nothing at all ever happened inside me, except that a fifteen-second section somewhere in the middle mildly engaged me. You could call this a blind spot — or a deaf spot — inside me, or else, as I would prefer, you could just say that the “fit” between my soul and Bartók’s is extremely poor. And this has been corroborated many times over with other Bartók pieces, so that now I am quite confident about what will (or rather, won’t) happen inside me when I hear Bartók. Although I like a few small pieces (based on folk songs) that he wrote, the bulk of his output doesn’t speak to me at all. And so my sense that this friend and I had a lot in common musically was greatly reduced, and in fact our friendship subsided thereafter.
After writing that paragraph, I grew curious as to whether a thirtyyear-old memory might be revealed invalid, or whether in the meantime my soul might perhaps have opened up to new musical horizons, so I went straight to my record player (yes, vinyl), put the Bartók violin concerto on once again, and listened to it carefully from beginning to end. My reaction was totally identical. To me, the piece just seems to wander and wander, never getting anywhere. Listening to it, I feel like a magnetic field bashing headlong into a superconductor — cannot penetrate even one micron! In case that’s too esoteric a metaphor, let’s just say that I’m stopped dead, right at the surface. It makes no sense at all to me; it is music written in an impenetrable idiom. It’s like looking at a book written in an alien