Concert-going.
I felt as much pleasure watching the crowd leave the theater, being part of it myself, as I had listening to the concert, if not more. It made me feel as though I’d been transported back to the 1800s, when concert- and theater-going were among the only pastimes and served an important social function, though I’ll never know whether that’s historically true or simply part of how I imagine the past. Watching people chat incessantly on their way out brought back that image of a more social era. I felt part of that tradition, carried out of my own time. I could almost imagine myself in the streets of some historic city, faint yellow streetlights lending the whole scene its quality.
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Beyond the nostalgic beauty, there’s the fact that all these people had just been joined together in a single experience, yet each person’s experience of it was profoundly different from their neighbor’s. It’s only in the leaving that this double reality becomes visible. And still, for those ninety minutes, thousands of beating hearts occupied the same plane of time and space, suspended together in the same melodies and images. Everyone became one. They formed, briefly, the totality of the audience. Their separate lives stayed outside the concert hall, and for that stretch of time, everyone was the same. But the moment the doors opened, their old lives rushed back into their bodies, and they remembered their obligations again. No longer suspended, they had to land back into the reality and habits of ordinary life. That whole duration would come to feel like a sweet instant, something that might have been no more than a midsummer night’s dream.
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