Or is it just capitalistic city life worldwide?
I don't even know who Joshua Bell is and my cousins are concert trained violinists in the Seattle Symphony.
Do we stop to smell the roses at all in DC culture? Not really, is the answer from reading this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
Should I hate DC all the more for this? Awww, shoot... why not! ;)
I think this is a good example of lonliness and capitalism... it's a good article published in a Dubai newspaper.
But really, hating DC more isn't the answer for me... it's caring for people around me. It's stopping long enough to deny my employment or employer the full ownership of my life. Perhaps it's leaving a job that enslaves me. Perhaps it's quitting greed altogether that robs me of these types of experiences. Is there a balance? I think so. Is a metro station a poor choice of venues to judge our social concern for one another, I think so.
In a metro station, people don't allow themselves to be impressed and stopped and mystified during intense pursuit of a goal. People are busy and in route somewhere when at a metro stop. Would Joshua Bell have been heard at a retreat center in the mountains of Boise, Idaho? Certainly! How about at in the tourist centers of America... maybe even in the Smithsonian Museum area of DC? I think so, yes. Is there leisure time to listen there? Yes.
But if you live in DC, how often have you gone there in the past 2 years that you've lived in the DC area?
I've gone 3 times in the 3 years I have lived here (and only to entertain visitors from out of town).
Does work bring us joy? For some of us the answer is yes. But judging from the use of antidepressants in America, therapists will tell you that the overwhelming answer is "no."
When we're dead and gone... was 30 years of our employer's demands all we will have experienced? Will we have travelled? Will we have lived in another culture? Will we have seen an elephant?... or visited our grandparents homeland? Will we have considered any beauty at all? Will we have tried our hands at a carving? A poem? An instrument? A painting?
I think, for me, if I continue the way I have been for the past 3 years, then in 30 years very few experiences of beauty will have been involved in my life. That is one reason I quit my job in DC and have vowed not to return to do a job there. I absolutely abhor the alienation of the metro system... the pin-drop silence of ignoring other living beings around me... the disbelieving looks from people when you say "good morning" on the streets. It's just inhuman... mechanistic... draining and WRONG.
And it really comes down to me and my loved one's expectations of my simplicity or complexity of living.
I think that fact was brought to bare on me very intensely through the book "Into the Wild" by John Krakauer.
In the beauty of Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer" says it quite well:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
