electric relaxation

The Washington Post sponsored an experiment in which Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed classical musicians of our time, spent 43 minutes playing as a street musician in the DC subway. You can read about it in this article.

I don’t know exactly why, but I found this entire piece to be very moving. Since I’m a pretty self-centered person, I’m also very much concerned with the question of whether I would have been “smart enough” to stop.

I didn’t think much of the fact that all the children stopped, though it reminded me of something I read in the 2006 Best American Nonrequired Reading. There’s a section entitled Best American Answers to the Question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. Allison Gopnik, a Berkeley psychologist and author of The Scientist in the Crib, has a theory that for babies and young children, “every day is first love in Paris, every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide-and-seek is Einstein in 1905.” The point is, children are fascinated by street musicians, but they’re also fascinated by streets.