armlessbear.com

2 Sundays ago the Washington Post magazine ran a piece that made me want to cry. I can’t even decide what makes my eyes well up when I read the story or what’s so damn depressing about it, but it does. Here is the premise: Joshua Bell (apparently a world-famous virtuoso violinist)sets up as a busker in L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in DC. He plays for over an hour some of the most beautiful and technically difficult solo violin pieces — on a cold, January morning during the height of rush-hour (7:51am).
What they wanted to know:
Would anyone stop because they recognized the sheer beauty of his playing?
Would he make any money?
Would he be recognized?

Over 1,000 people walked by him that morning. Very, very few people stopped or even lingered. He only made $32 and change and 1 person recognized him.
The WaPo staff chased people down after they’d walked by and asked for phone numbers to conduct a “commuting study” and asked lots of people why they did or did not stop.
I’d say that the answers are typical DC answers, but I suspect they’d be typical of any large American city where people just hurry, sometimes for no good reason at all, and sometimes for so sad you have to laugh legitimate reasons (i.e. the dude who couldn’t be late or he’d have to put in for vacation time for the late time he’d accrued!)

I wonder if I would have stopped. I’m certainly never one to schedule a first-thing in the AM meeting and I have no moral problems with being late, so I might have stopped. On the other hand, I’m not a huge fan of the violin as solo instrument and not familiar with solo violin repetoire so I wouldn’t have felt as compelled to listen to the end of the piece I’d walked in on. On the other Other hand, I’ve stopped and listened all sorts of buskers when I recognized they actually knew how to play the instrument they were holding — e.g. steel drums, barely amplified electric guitar, flute, saxophone, violin, trumpet and, I think, the clarinet. I’ve even put money in a few times, but quite often I don’t actually have cash and when I do, I hate to part the bills I do have and change feels so cheap.

Commenters to the Monday on-line discussion on this article noted that in European cities like Paris people do stop for buskers and that urban life has less of this fabricated urgency you see in DC…
I can’t decide if this article should be taken as
1)Social commentary of an isolated incident
2)Damning commentary on the soullessness of modern existence in the US
3)A poorly designed “study” setup to fail by conducting it on a cold, Monday morning when people can barely muster up enough coherence to order a venti-non fat half-caf moccacchino, no whip before they can face the day, much less perceive the beauty in the world around them.
In any case, I hope the one lesson I can take away from this is to learn to enjoy what’s around me a little more than I normally do.