Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 172.
A surgeon has a moment of epiphany when he
drops into a jazz club where his son is playing:
“No longer tired, Henry comes away from the
wall where he’s been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium,
towards the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare
moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found
before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or
technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as
friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of
our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you
have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist
detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved,
happiness for everyone, for ever — mirages for which people are prepared to die
and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic
state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually
lift on this dream of community, and it’s tantalisingly conjured, before fading
away with the last notes.”
Cf. contextualised in the Eucharistic in
Timothy Radcliffe OP, Why God To Church?
The Drama of the Eucharist (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 63.
