"I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” – Albert Einstein
There is a rhapsody in the sounds of a city. But so often we’re numbed to the rising crescendo around us. We walk with our headphones in, as if we were born with little ear-buds attached, and wires hanging down to be connected to iPhones. In part, I came to Oxford hoping to throw away all the distractions that numb me. I came to learn that Oxford’s symphony is the spinning whir of bicycles along the road and the steady rhythm of crew boat oars sinking into the water.
I went down to London to see what music a city that holds two millennia of dreams and lives may make. London is a great white metropolis at its center. There are no skyscrapers gashing the firmament like in New York, but instead a collection of quiet giants that are too wise and too sleepy to talk to tourists anymore. Maybe they kept up a conversation a few centuries ago, but they’ve fallen into silence.
I walk along Oxford Street, where a current of (alternating by group) lost, excited, loud, shopping tourists drifts around me. I listen to the voices of a hundred countries jostling each other in the air. There is the sing-song lilt of Italians with heavily lined smoky eyes and high heeled boots. There are the skeptical tones of a group of French teenagers, smoking along the street corners and looking cooler at fifteen than most of the world will ever look. A mass of shoving Spanish middle schoolers look out, wide-eyed and ecstatic, as they push their way along the streets. It is like an exotic menagerie, with the cawing and roaring of the crowds fighting against the purr of red buses and English taxis for dominance.
Oxford Street is all brightly lit shops where last year's hit music comes blaring out the glass doors. I can see hunting packs of women going through the racks like a feeding frenzy. Husbands follow behind. At Oxford Circus, an intersection that holds a towering H&M, French Connection, etc. (a veritable haven of capitalism in one corner), I turn right onto Regent Street. It is a relief to get away. But later, I keep thinking of the sounds of Oxford Street, maybe because of how much vibrancy is in the sound of all those lives coming together. When I wear headphones, I miss the most beautiful elements of a city: living, breathing, crying-to-be heard people. And underneath the buzz of today is the very real voice of all the past lingering in the air. Still awake, still alive in the silence of the old white stone.