- A- Often when I listen to this music, I'm struck by mysterious emotions with regard to time. To think that people four hundred years ago were listening to the same music we're hearing now! Doesn't it make you feel strange?
- B- It does, but come to think of it, those people four hundred years ago were looking at the same moon we see.
- A- You're quite right about that. Looking at it that way, I guess there's nothing mysterious about people listening to the same music four hundred years apart.
- B- Perhaps I should have said almost the same moon.
- A-The performance on this CD uses period instruments, exactly as it was written at the time, so the music sounds pretty much as it did back then. It's like the moon.
- B- Even if things were the same, people perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter. And of course people didn't have records or tapes or CDs. They couldn't hear proper performances of music anytime they liked: it was always something special.
- A- I'm sure you're right. Things are so convenient for us these days, our perceptions are probably that much duller. Even if it's the same moon hanging in the sky, we may be looking at something quite different. Four hundred years ago, we might have had richer spirits that were closer to nature.
- B- It was a cruel world, though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't very many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys, too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Download.
- A- What an interesting person you are!
- B- I'm a very ordinary human being. I just happen to like reading books. Especially history books.
- A- I like history books too. They teach us that we're basically the same, whether now or in the old days. There may be a few differences in clothing and lifestyle, but there's not that much difference in what we think and do. Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers--passageways--for genes. They ride us into about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just a means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
- B- In spite of that, we can't help but think about what is good and what is evil. Is that what you're saying?
- A- Exactly. People have to think about those things. But genes are what control the basis for how we live. Naturally, a contradiction arises.
-- extracted from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
