I Am a Strange Loop

I personally can attest to the terrifying technical difficulty of this incredible surging piece of music, having valiantly attempted to learn it when I was around sixteen and having sadly been forced to give it up in mid-stream, since playing just the first page up to speed (which I finally managed to do after several weeks of unbelievably arduous practice) made my right hand throb with pain. But the technical difficulty is, of course, not what Huneker was referring to. Quite rightly, he is saying that the piece is majestic and noble, but more controversially, he is drawing a dividing line between different levels or “sizes” of human souls, suggesting that some people are simply not up to playing this piece, not because of any physical limitations of their bodies, but because their souls are not “large enough”. (I won’t bother to criticize the sexism of Huneker’s words; that was par for the course in those days.)

This kind of sentiment does not go down well in today’s egalitarian America. It would not play in Peoria. Quite frankly, it rings terribly elitist, perhaps even repugnant, to our modern democratic ears. And yet I have to admit that I somewhat agree with Huneker, and I can’t help wondering if we don’t all of us implicitly believe in the validity of something vaguely like the idea of “small-souled” and “large-souled” human beings. In fact, I can’t help suggesting that this is indeed the belief of almost all of us, no matter how egalitarian we publicly profess to be.

Small-souled and Large-souled Humans

Some of us believe in capital punishment — the intentional public squelching of a human soul, no matter how ardently that soul would plead for mercy, would tremble, would shake, would shriek, would desperately struggle to escape, on being led down the corridor to the site of their doom.

Some of us, perhaps almost all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

In earlier days, perhaps some of us would have believed (as did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, each in their own way, at least for some period of time) that it was not immoral to own slaves and to buy and sell them, breaking up families willy-nilly, just as we do today with, for example, horses, dogs, and cats.

Some religious people believe that atheists, agnostics, and followers of other faiths — and worst of all, traitors who have abandoned “the” faith — have no souls at all, and are therefore eminently deserving of death.

Some people (including some women) believe that women have no souls — or perhaps, a little more generously, that women have “smaller souls” than men do.

Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone. It strikes us that although there is a human brain couched inside each of those cranial shells, something has gone away from that brain — something essential, something that contains the secrets of that person’s soul. The “I” has either wholly or partly vanished, gone down the drain, never to be found again.

Some of us (again, I count myself in this group) believe that neither a just-fertilized egg nor a five-month old fetus possesses a full human soul, and that, in some sense, a potential mother’s life counts more than the life of that small creature, alive though it indisputably is.

Hattie the Chocolate Labrador

Kellie: After brunch we’re going out to see Lynne’s turkey, which we haven’t seen yet.

Doug: Which, or whom?

Kellie: Which, I’d say. A turkey’s not a whom.

Doug: I see… So is Hattie a whom, or a which?

Kellie: Oh, she’s a whom, no doubt.

Ollie the Golden Retriever

Doug: So how did Ollie enjoy the outing this afternoon at Lake Griffy?

Danny: Oh, he had a pretty good time, but he didn’t play much with the other dogs. He liked playing with the people, though.

Doug: Really? How come?

Danny: Ollie’s a people person.

Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?