Like many New Yorkers, I have an iGadget for music, which is a necessary accessory on the subway, and like many New Yorkers, I always carry a book on the subway, another necessary accessory. There’s something about this great big city and about the subway in particular. It can make you crazy being surrounded all the time by the mass of humanity. You feel them pressing close to you always, jostling you and wanting your attention or just a little more space for themselves. Even in your home, you are never alone. There are the noises of the neighbors or just the noises of the street below your window. Sometimes that living breathing mass of humanity that you cannot escape can be comforting, can make you feel a part of some larger human community, but sometimes, you need to escape, and lacking friends who can lend you their cabin in the Adirondacks, you have to make your own escape here in the confines of the city, which is where your trusty iGadget and books come in handy.
Because the subway is the subway, though, and therefore crowded and full of people, it often is not enough to just read a book or just listen to music, especially during rush hours when the crush of people can overwhelm even the most seasoned New Yorker. As a result, I long ago developed the habit of listening to music as I read on the train. The music is there as background, as a buffer between me and the noise of everyone else. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think it is simply that noise is not a distraction or an intrusion so long as it is predictable noise, in this case music, but the trouble with my fellow subway passengers is that they noise they make is unpredictable and unfamiliar to me. It’s noise I cannot choose or control, and as a result, it’s necessary for me to put up a wall of my own noise in order to create a space in which I can think, concentrate, and—in some small sense—be by myself.
Recently, though, I have become aware of an intriguing side effect of reading while listening to music. Early last summer, I read Moby Dick for the first time, and at the same time I was reading the book, I was listening obsessively to an album called Libraries by The Love Language. In point of fact, obsessively is generally how I listen to an album. I develop “crushes” on records or songs and listen to the same ones multiple times per day for days on end, sometimes for weeks. When the crush ends, I move onto another album or song.
It’s fair to say that while reading Moby Dick, I had a crush on Libraries, so while I read Melville on the train, I listened to songs like “Pedals,” with its slow instrumental beginning that gets louder and louder until all the instruments finally kick in and then words with their maritime talk of cannons and guns. I also listened to “Blue Angel” and its lyrics about sinking ships and learning to swim and to my personal favorite, “Heart to Tell,” where Stuart Mc Lamb sings, “I’m no sailor. I want to rock the boat.” In some ways, it came to seem like the album was made to accompany Moby Dick, like it was created as a soundtrack. It certainly became that to me. Over and over as I read, I felt the music punctuated the action of the novel, sometimes eerily so, and the music is now so intimately connected to the book that whenever songs from Libraries come up on my random shuffle, images and incidents from Moby Dick come into my mind and I’m invaded by an intense desire to read the novel again. I imagine that when I do read it again, I’ll have to listen to Libraries as I read. If I don’t, I think the songs will play in my head anyway.
Since this happened, this total enmeshing of book and record, I’ve imagined it a freak, a one-off. I thought it was a lucky and happy coincidence never to be repeated, a special bit of serendipitous magic that I’d stumbled onto. Because it had never happened before that a novel and an album had resonated so fully, I imagined it would never happen again
Well, I recently developed a new crush on an album, Of Monsters and Men’s My Head is an Animal. At about the same time, I began reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I cannot say enough about either of them. The album is full of things I love—beautiful vocalists both male and female who sing beautiful harmonies, songs quiet and thoughtful and songs raucous and hellbent on living, lyrics lush and quotable. It has an energy and life pulsing through it, even in its quieter moments. This makes it a natural companion to Woolf, whose novel similarly shimmers and pulses with life like the sea that is nearly itself a character in the novel. As I read To the Lighthouse, I too felt full of life. More than once, I did a little happy dance to release what the beauty of the words had pent up inside of me. The language is of a kind that you can hold inside of yourself for twenty years, as Carole Maso notes in her preface to her book Aureole. To the Lighthouse is a book you absorb and carry inside of you just as My Head is an Animal is an album you wake up in the morning hearing in your head.
As I read on the train listening to my new favorite album, the same thing that happened with Moby Dick and Libraries began to happen. There was a resonance between the novel and the album that became inescapable so much so that every time I played My Head is an Animal, I felt compelled to open To the Lighthouse and read. It was nearly Pavlovian, like a dog that salivates at the ring of the bell but my bell was a song like “Lakehouse” and my salivation was for a book, not a bone.
Now that I’ve read the final words, I do not know what I’ll do when I play the album. I cannot help wishing the novel had a sequel or wondering if it would be strange to read the book again from the beginning after just having finished. To the Lighthouse and My Head is an Animal seem oddly made for one another right down the boat-creaking sounds that end “Little Talks,” one of my favorite cuts from the album. I’m not done with my crush on the record, and I don’t want to let go of the refreshing solace that diving into Woolf’s words brought. Reading the novel was like “standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.” That’s how Lily’s consciousness expresses the vividness of life at certain moments like returning from a journey or just at the end an illness or like the final morning described in To the Lighthouse.
Tonight I feel, as I did at the end of Moby Dick, that some beautiful and life-changing love affair has, against my will, come to an end which I’m not yet prepared for, an end which I may never be prepared for. I feel marked and changed, and I believe fully that the albums I listened to as I read are as much a part of this feeling as the novels. I have no way of knowing if the songwriters of these albums even read the books I’ve so passionately adored, much less if they had them in mind at all as they wrote their songs, but honestly, it doesn’t matter if they did. All that matters in this moment, on this evening is that I have been given these gifts of accidental juxtaposition and that I have hope, thanks to the little bits of technology I carry with me in my pocket, of experiencing more such happy accidents.
