What changed my life--and made me feel for the first time I could really become a kind person--was learning from Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism that my deepest desire is to like the world. I learned this great fact: only by caring for things and people as much as honestly possible, can a man like himself. 

There is something in us that says if we respect something or like something, we have taken away from ourselves. There is that in us which wants to like nothing but ourselves, and any time we consent to like something else we think we are giving up some of the love pie, the approval pie.

        At Oberlin Conservatory, where I was a student of music,  I cared for Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky--and I was proud I had strong feelings that the brutal war against the people of Vietnam had to end. Yet the contemptuous way of mind Mr. Siegel so kindly and incisively described, I also had. 

        I was fiercely competitive. At any gathering, I wanted desperately to be seen as the smartest person there. In a Freshman philosophy course, I arrogantly wrote a paper ripping into Aristotle's supposed bad logic. I now see I hated the respect my professor--and all of history--had for this great man. Hating respect, I made myself both ridiculous and stupid. 

        The desire to be the center of attention, to like--as Mr. Siegel said--"nothing but" myself, also made me terribly cold. When a friend told me his troubles, I moved on to mine--which I just assumed were "deeper" and more important to talk about. It was no accident that by November of my Freshman year my roommates had moved out, and I was alone in a dorm room designed for three. 

        "Have you seen your individuality as coming from where you are like other people, or different?"--my Aesthetic Realism consultants asked when, thank God, three years later, I began to hear the questions I needed to change my uncaring way of mind.  

        "Different," I said.  

        They asked, "Do you often feel lonely?" 

        "Yes. I dread it." 

        "But do you think you also might cherish it?" I had never thought of that! 

        Earlier my consultants had asked many questions about how I saw the world growing up--questions about my friends, teachers, and my family. "We have to see where your loneliness begins," they continued. "For example, if you saw where you and your mother are the same and different, would you come out more of an individual or less?"  

EG:  I'd say less. I would really feel like a satellite.  

Consultants:  That means you're seeing yourself either as too much the same and not enough different--or too different and not enough the same. If you wanted to respect your mother you would want there to be an accurate relation between the two. 

EG:  But I don't want accuracy--I just want distance. 

Consultants:  And what do you want as a musician? You have to ask: what do you deeply want in life? Not to care about accuracy is contempt. It is completely against art. In art there is a tremendous drive for accuracy; and that drive is the same as good will.

        Take, for example, the art of the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould as he performs the "Fugue in C# major" from book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. To play a fugue well--to have several melodies heard clearly at once, joined to each other and yet soaring freely in space with unimpeded individuality--that is a high point of musical art! It is technically called counterpoint. And Gould was celebrated for the way he played counterpoint: there was clarity and joyous energy in his rhythm; firmness and tenderness in his touch. Listen:  

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

        Flora, herself, had been frustrated by her marriage. When interviewed by biographer Peter Ostwald, Herbert Gould explained that the reason his wife had not pursued the operatic career she so seriously had prepared for, was: 

I came along at the wrong time...You see, in those days it would be unheard of for a married woman to pursue a career. Once you were married, why, you settled down to domesticity, and raised your children.

        He knew his parents saw him as a superior child, and he liked it. Geoffrey Payzant, in his book Glenn Gould: Music and Mind, quotes him as telling an interviewer in his native Toronto: 

I found going to school a most unhappy experience and got along miserably with...all of my fellow students.

        In his great 1964 lecture, The American Family Versus American Art, Eli Siegel explains: 

We have a tendency already to be prejudiced in favor of ourselves...Ego-disproportion is a horrible thing. It makes the world less interesting...But this ego-disproportion is fostered in the family. 

        The unjust victories of childhood, I learned, have to be seen and revoked by a man or he will spend his life a stranger to his true self.  

        And he will be cold, because once a man thinks he should be the focus of other people's adoring attention, he will never be able to care truly for anyone else. 

        In a greatly kind class in l977, at a time when I was very pained about love--because I had been unfair to a woman but didn't want to be honest about it--Mr. Siegel spoke to me, asking: "Do you think your parents made you into a potentate, and potentates never regret?" "I think so," I answered. And Mr. Siegel continued, with such compassion: 

No one understands fully what it means to have feeling. Every person has felt they were too God-damned cold, with hearts too much like stone or cold spaghetti. You don't have to feel picked out. But as a person is afraid of being cold, he is also afraid of being warmer, because God knows what it will lead to.

        And his care for the world took other forms. He loved animals. He spoke out repeatedly about the danger to art and society of competition--calling it "the root of all evil." And so importantly, he wanted people to remember gratefully the heroism of the Soviet army during World War Two, and so began work composing a cantata honoring their victory at Stalingrad, the battle which turned the tide of the war and saved the world from Hitler. And he wrote many essays on music, some with charming humor--including a valuable satire of psychoanalysis: an imaginary review, by a Dr. S.F. Lemming, of a performance of Beethoven's Fifth. 

        Yet, surprisingly, when you think of the energy of the man, and the joy which so often pervades his music, Glenn Gould had no close friends. His relations with women were secretive and short-lived. He preferred to be alone. In fact, he created a radio documentary, entitled The Idea of North, for the express purpose of glorifying the cold, isolated Canadian Arctic. 

        And there was something "arctic" in him. Some of his recordings--especially of Mozart--have an unlikable hard sound. In his biography, Ostwald tells of how Glenn Gould would suddenly drop people who were getting close to him. And despite his great knowledge and talent, Gould refused to teach, explaining in an interview: 

I'm afraid of teaching. I find it extremely stimulating when I'm in the mood to sit down and talk with people and analyze music, but I'm subject to periods of non-communication, so it would be very draining to have to do it at prerequisite hours. Also, I need spinal resilence when I'm confronted with opinions not my own.

        "Any time the ego cares for something," Eli Siegel explained in a 1969 lesson, "it has in reserve: I know I'll dismiss it. It happens when we care for something, we think we have a right to punish that thing." When someone present at the lesson asked why we feel we have that right, Mr. Siegel explained: "Because that person took more from ourselves than the ego wanted to give."  

        The debate about warmth and coldness took other forms in Gould as well. He would often telephone people in the dead of the night to play them recordings, and would not take no for an answer. He also had a constant fear of getting sick. Even in hot weather he dressed as if it were the midst of winter. One can ask whether this was, perhaps, a way he had come to of punishing himself for being wrongly cold to the world. 

        In his distress, Gould took far more medication than was good for him--undermining his health. And though doctors could find little wrong, he was convinced he had serious problems with his shoulders and his hands, making live performance impossible. 

        A question Aesthetic Realism kindly asks--and I am grateful personally to have heard it--is whether a man can prefer to see himself as "too sensitive" to take part in this crass, harsh world? Can there even be a hope to be ill, because then you have an "unarguable" reason to withdraw from other people, concentrate on yourself, and be able to look down disdainfully on all those boorish, healthy ones. 

To be wholly glad that something exists is not easy. There is distaste, toleration, advocacy, enthusiasm, ecstasy and then the permanent vision. There are various degrees of being for something. To be for something entirely is the purpose of life!

I'm drunk on it...It's the greatest chamber-music performance with piano that I've heard in my life....It's the most spontaneous performance imaginable, but at the same time it's so organized, so tight, so right.

Suddenly you just abandoned the field...It was very strange, and I've thought a lot about it, because it is a great loss....There was never a moment when you felt that very special emanation from an audience? 

GG:  There really wasn't....

AR:  But you never felt you had the souls of those people?

GG:  I didn't really want their souls, you know....I certainly wasn't stimulated by their presence as such.

AR:  There we are, absolute opposites, you know!

         Later, however, he punished Rubinstein for questioning him. In an article in Piano Quarterly, he spoofs his older--and I believe greater--colleague, making hurtful fun of the very thing he loved in him: his ability to be warmly spontaneous, and gorgeously exact at once; to put opposites together. He makes Rubinstein say: 

As my readers will be the first to attest, I am the last fellow to belabor the obvious supremacy of my own art, but I do insist that it is my unquenchable love of life and of inaccuracy which has always set my Scarlatti apart.

        The situation was different, but some years ago--early in my knowing of the woman I now am so proud to love, Aesthetic Realism consultant Carrie Wilson--I found myself irritated and uncomfortable. I loved being with Carrie; our conversations--about music, about people, about history and nature--made me very happy, had me see new meaning in the world around me. I was becoming a warmer person. But foolishly and meanly I felt: it wasn't enough. I was waiting for her to say words that would have me feel what, years before, my mother had me feel--that I was more important than other people. 

        I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, and with tremendous good will, Ellen Reiss asked: "Do you think it is a crisis, "if you are affected very much by another person? You would like to impinge your personality on people, but they shouldn't have you?" "I think so," I answered, and she  
continued: 

Do you think you are less able to hide than you once were?...Miss Wilson would like to praise...but occasionally she has the "cruelty" to question some things.

        In l981, just months before his sudden death, at age 50, from a stroke, Glenn Gould decided to make a new recording of the Goldberg Variations. It is a tremendously moving thing; it has, I feel, the conflict of Glenn Gould's life in it, made into art: the fight between the self separate, and the self joined to, and caring for, the world. 

        Listen to how beautifully he plays the aria which begins Bach's great composition. The tempo is astonishingly slow. Each note of the melody stands sharply by itself, insisting on its individuality--almost on the edge of immobility. And yet Gould uses that very slowness, that courageous lingering, to have us feel powerfully each note is calling out to the next, yearning for it, almost crying--"I am not myself without you!"  

        "The resolution of conflict in self," Eli Siegel greatly stated, "is like the making one of opposites in art." What Glenn Gould accomplishes here--the feeling, "my individuality goes along with, in fact depends on, caring for others"--is what every man is hoping for, and what, heart-breakingly, he found so hard to sustain in his life. This is the beginning of that great recording: