The Music Above the Firmament

I have never entirely trusted a beautiful sound.

This is not to say that I have made a habit of avoiding music. On the contrary, I have been susceptible to it since childhood, and have occasionally allowed a well-turned melody to accomplish what several pages of theological argument had failed to do. There are passages in Handel before which I have found my scepticism temporarily unemployed; there are hymns which, sung by an ordinary congregation with an extraordinary lack of musical accomplishment, have seemed to me more persuasive than many a sermon delivered by a gentleman who possessed both a doctorate and a voice.

Nevertheless, beauty is a notoriously unreliable witness. It may testify to the existence of truth, but it can also make falsehood appear respectable. A fine voice may belong to a liar; a handsome church may shelter a miserable congregation; and the most exquisite sentence in the English language may be employed to recommend an opinion which would not survive five minutes in the company of a competent grammarian.

I had not yet arrived at these conclusions, at least not in their present form, when, in the early nineteen-seventies, a glass harmonica player came to Carrickfergus. I remember the occasion at the Town Hall with an unusual clarity, though I cannot now say whether the clarity belongs to the event itself or to the numerous times I have reconstructed it since. Memory is an industrious editor. It supplies a missing expression here, improves the weather there, and occasionally inserts an entire conversation which the participants may never have had. I should be particularly careful about that last offence, for I intend to recount a conversation in which four young people attempted to decide whether an instrument made of glass might tell us anything, not about music or earthly beauty, but about heaven.

We were young enough to believe that an argument, provided it was conducted with sufficient intelligence, might eventually persuade the universe to disclose its intentions.

Our visitor arrived with an instrument that looked less like a musical invention than an arrangement of delicate vessels prepared for a particularly fastidious chemist. He had travelled with a collection of glass bowls, each of a different size, mounted concentrically upon a horizontal spindle. When the spindle turned, the player touched the rims with moistened fingers, and the glass answered him.

The instrument was known as the glass harmonica, or, in the older spelling, the armonica. Its invention was associated with Benjamin Franklin, whose ingenuity had already given the world ample reason to suspect that the inhabitants of the eighteenth century had been more resourceful than their descendants sometimes supposed. Franklin had taken the principle of musical glasses and devised a more convenient mechanism by which the bowls could rotate together, allowing a player to produce several notes without the cumbersome arrangement of separate drinking vessels.

That was the practical explanation.

It did not prepare me for the sound.

The concert was held in a room which, for the purposes of the occasion, had been made respectable by the removal of several chairs and the introduction of a modest platform. I remember the windows, though I cannot swear that the rain I associate with them actually fell that evening. Carrickfergus has a way of lending moisture to recollection, whether or not the weather has earned the privilege. The town's stones seem to retain the atmosphere of the North Channel, and its older buildings possess the solemnity of things which have watched generations of human beings arrive with ambitions and depart with excuses.

Arthur, Michael, Helena, and I attended together.

Arthur was already the sort of person who made an ordinary evening feel like the preliminary meeting of a learned society. He had an intelligence which did not announce itself so much as invite other people to discover it. When he spoke, he appeared to be thinking not merely about what he wished to say, but about what the words would permit him to mean. He was patient, sometimes maddeningly so, and had a tendency to treat every question as though it deserved to be completed before anybody attempted to answer it.

Michael was younger than the rest of us and more earnest. He believed in justice, loyalty, and the moral obligation to do something about the injustices of the world. He was suspicious of cleverness when cleverness appeared to be enjoying itself. He had little patience for opinions that demanded no sacrifice from the person holding them, and he possessed a gift for converting abstract principles into uncomfortable questions about how we actually lived.

Helena was more difficult to describe, which was one of her principal advantages over the rest of us. Her intelligence worked sideways. She could discover the weakness in an argument without appearing to listen to it, and her raised eyebrow was sometimes more devastating than an entire lecture. She distrusted enthusiasm, especially mine, though she had sufficient generosity to tolerate it in carefully measured quantities. Her memory for the small particulars of other people's lives was extraordinary. She remembered what had been promised, what had been forgotten, and what somebody had said three months earlier while pretending not to care.

I, meanwhile, was already developing the unfortunate habit of treating an interesting speculation as though it had been waiting centuries for me to express it.

We took our seats.

The player introduced his instrument with the modesty of a man who knew that its appearance would perform most of the introductory work. He explained the arrangement of the bowls, the rotating spindle, and the use of moistened fingers. He spoke of Franklin and of the instrument's former popularity in Europe. There were references to eighteenth-century composers, to the fashionable drawing rooms in which musical glasses had once entertained cultivated company, and to the difficulty of making the instrument heard in the increasingly large concert halls of a later age.

Then he began to play.

I have heard bells in churches, wind moving through the rigging of ships, and water striking stone in such a manner that one might reasonably suspect it of attempting a tune. I have heard the organ at the beginning of a service when the congregation is still settling itself, and the first notes seem to rise through the building rather than merely occupy the air. I have heard, too, the strange resonance of a glass vessel when a wet finger is drawn around its rim.

The glass harmonica was unlike all of them.

Its notes did not seem to emerge from the instrument so much as become audible in the room. They were thin without being weak, pure without being simple, and possessed of a sustained quality which made the ordinary separation between one note and the next seem almost discourteous. A note began, and the ear waited for it to finish; but it did not finish in the manner of a struck bell or a plucked string. It seemed to recede, leaving behind a narrow corridor through which another note could enter.

The sound was not loud. That was part of its effect. It did not command the room by force. It persuaded the room to become quiet.

I remember thinking that if an angel were to make music without wishing to draw attention to the fact that he was making music, he might choose something of this kind.

I was not, I should explain, claiming to have heard an angel. I was young, but not so young as to confuse an impression with evidence. Nevertheless, the thought came to me with sufficient force that I felt obliged to examine it, as one might examine a suspicious stamp under a magnifying glass.

The player continued. The melody moved with a curious delicacy, and I became aware that the sound seemed to possess a depth out of proportion to its volume. It was as though the notes were coming from a greater distance than the walls of the room allowed.

At one point I closed my eyes.

This was a mistake, though not because I saw anything alarming. Rather, the absence of sight made the sound appear to have no fixed location. I could not tell whether it was near me or beyond the windows, above the roof, or somewhere inside the architecture of my own head. I opened my eyes again and discovered the player seated precisely where I had left him, industriously making music from a collection of glass bowls.

It was reassuring to see him.

It was also faintly disappointing.

When the performance ended, there was a moment of silence before the applause. I remember that silence more distinctly than the applause. It was not the ordinary silence of an audience deciding whether it had enjoyed itself. It seemed instead that we were all waiting for something to resume, as though the music had interrupted a conversation which had been taking place long before any of us entered the room.

Arthur leaned towards me.

"Well," he whispered, "that is an instrument which seems to have been invented by somebody who was dissatisfied with the ordinary properties of matter."

Helena heard him.

"Or by somebody who had a perfectly good set of glasses and too much time."

Michael, who had listened with an expression of intense concentration, did not smile.

I said nothing. I was still thinking about the sound of water.

And about the sky.

After the concert, we strolled along Joymount, eventually finding ourselves in a place where we could talk without the necessity of lowering our voices. I shall not pretend that the evening was arranged with the literary convenience which it has acquired in recollection. We did not immediately assemble beneath a dramatic moon, nor did the sea obligingly begin to roar at the precise moment that our discussion reached its theological climax. The weather, if I remember correctly, was ordinary. Our walk was ordinary. It was our conversation that became extraordinary, though not necessarily in the sense that any of us would have chosen.

Michael was the first to return to the concert.

"I did not like it," he said.

Helena looked at him.

"You sat through the whole thing without moving."

"I did not say that it was unpleasant to hear. I said I did not like it."

"That is a distinction worthy of a committee," Arthur remarked.

Michael ignored him.

"There was something oppressive about it. It made me feel as though the music was trying to take me somewhere without telling me where."

"Perhaps all music does that," Arthur replied. "The difference is that some instruments have the decency to tell us how they intend to get there."

Helena considered this.

"I thought it sounded like a ghost trying to remember a hymn."

That was the first moment in which I recognised that my friends had been listening as carefully as I had, although we had apparently brought four different minds to the same collection of notes.

Arthur had heard an experiment in the properties of matter. Michael had experienced something almost coercive. Helena had found an image of the past attempting to recover its voice.

I had heard water above the heavens.

I did not say so immediately. It is difficult to introduce a theological proposition into a conversation without giving one's companions the impression that one has been waiting all evening for an opportunity to do so. I had not, in fact, been waiting. I had been trying to determine whether the proposition deserved to be spoken.

"The sound reminded me," I said at last, "of water moving over glass."

Helena turned towards me.

"That is an unusually elaborate way of saying that it sounded like water."

"Water is not always water," I replied.

"That," said Arthur, "is either the beginning of a profound argument or a confession that Timothy has lost the thread of his own sentence."

"I mean that the sound seemed to come from above us. Not merely from a height, but from beyond the ordinary limits of the world."

Michael frowned.

"The ceiling?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"The heavens."

There was a brief silence.

Helena sighed with theatrical resignation.

"I was afraid of that."

I should have expected her reaction. Helena was not hostile to religion, but she was hostile to the use of religion as a means of decorating an impression. If I wished to persuade her that a sound had theological significance, I would have to do more than announce that it had made me think of heaven. I would have to explain why the association was worth taking seriously.

"The old cosmological picture," I continued, "in which the heavens are separated from the waters below by a firmament. A great expanse, established by God, which divides the waters above from the waters beneath."

Arthur looked interested.

"You are thinking of Genesis."

"Yes. The second day of Creation."

"And you think the instrument sounds like water above the firmament?"

"I think it sounds rather like what one might imagine water to sound like if one had never heard it, but had been told that it existed beyond a transparent boundary separating the world from the heavens."

Helena stopped walking.

"That is a remarkably specific imagination."

"It is not an imagination without precedent."

"No," she said. "But precedent is not the same as evidence."

I was obliged to concede the point.

The distinction between the two was one I should have liked to preserve throughout my life. I have not always succeeded.

"The Hebrew word traditionally translated as 'firmament'," I said, "is raqia. In the language of Genesis, God makes the firmament and separates the waters beneath it from the waters above it. The King James Bible gives us the word in all its formidable simplicity. I have sometimes wondered whether the old cosmological imagination, which understood the heavens as a structured realm rather than an indefinitely extending emptiness, might be more difficult for modern people to dismiss than they suppose."

"That depends on what you mean by 'the old cosmological imagination'," Arthur said. "There is the language of a text, the picture which its first hearers might have formed, the picture developed by later theologians, and the physical universe described by observation. Those are not necessarily identical."

"Nor," I replied, "are they necessarily unrelated."

"No. But we ought to know which of them we are discussing."

Arthur had a way of making intellectual caution sound like an act of kindness. He did not wish to humiliate an argument. He wished to give it an opportunity to become what it claimed to be.

I explained that I had never regarded the traditional picture of the firmament as a mere decorative metaphor. In my more speculative moods, I had considered whether the waters above the heavens might possess a reality which modern cosmology, having adopted a different set of assumptions, had ceased to expect. The glass harmonica had provided no evidence for that proposition, of course. It had merely given the speculation an unexpected sensory companion.

The sound had seemed transparent, suspended, and remote. It had resembled something heard through a barrier which permitted the passage of sound while concealing the nature of what lay beyond it.

Arthur listened without interrupting.

Michael, however, was not satisfied.

"Suppose you are right about the sound," he said. "What follows? Suppose it really does remind you of the waters above the firmament. Why should that tell you anything about the heavens themselves?"

"It may tell me something about the limits of my imagination," I answered. "And perhaps that is enough for one evening."

"No," he said. "You have already suggested that the sound is connected with heaven. I want to know whether you think the connection is real or whether you merely like the idea."

This was Michael at his most uncomfortable and, consequently, at his most useful. He would not permit a beautiful thought to escape examination merely because it had arrived in beautiful clothing.

"I do not know," I said.

Helena looked at me with something approaching surprise.

"How refreshing."

"I know what I heard. I know what it reminded me of. I do not know whether the resemblance possesses any significance beyond my own mind."

Arthur nodded.

"That is a respectable beginning."

"It is not a conclusion," Michael said.

"No," Arthur replied. "But a conclusion reached too early is often merely a prejudice which has learned to sit upright."

Helena laughed.

Michael did not, but he allowed us to continue.

The question of the instrument's supposed dangers arose when we had returned to the subject of the concert and begun to discuss why such an extraordinary invention had largely disappeared from ordinary public performance.

The glass harmonica had enjoyed a considerable vogue in the eighteenth century. It had attracted accomplished performers and composers, and its associations with Franklin gave it an additional intellectual glamour. Yet by the early nineteenth century it had largely vanished from fashionable musical life.

There were practical explanations. Its sound could be difficult to project in large halls, particularly as orchestras grew in size and the power of other instruments became increasingly important. Its delicate construction made it vulnerable to damage. Its unusual playing technique required skill, and its distinctive timbre was not suited to every musical setting.

These were all plausible reasons.

There were also darker explanations, or what passed for explanations in the less cautious corners of musical history.

It had been claimed that the instrument drove its players mad, disturbed their nerves, and plunged listeners into melancholy. Reports associated with German musical circles, especially Vienna, had acquired a life of their own. The glass harmonica was said to produce effects upon the nervous system that ordinary instruments did not. Its ethereal tones, so the argument went, could unsettle the mind, weaken the spirits, and perhaps lead the susceptible towards madness.

The celebrated musicologist Johann Friedrich Rochlitz had warned against its excessive use. His advice, as it was commonly repeated, amounted to this: those already suffering from nervous disorders should avoid playing it; those who were healthy should not play it excessively; and those who felt melancholy should choose uplifting music instead.

Helena found the recommendation amusing.

"Imagine being told by your doctor that you are too sad to listen to a musical instrument."

"One might reasonably ask," Arthur said, "whether the doctor had considered the possibility that the patient was sad because he had been obliged to listen to the doctor's opinions."

Michael remained serious.

"Was there any evidence that the instrument caused illness?"

"Not in the sense required to establish the claim," Arthur replied. "There were reports, anecdotes, and observations. There was also a culture which was increasingly interested in the nerves, sensibility, and the effects of art upon the body. But the existence of a report is not proof of its explanation."

"Some players did suffer from melancholy," I said.

"People suffer from melancholy without the assistance of musical instruments," Helena observed. "I have met several who manage it perfectly well with nothing more complicated than their own personalities."

I laughed, but Arthur raised another possibility.

"There is also the question of expectation. If a person is told that a sound is dangerous, the experience of hearing it may become entangled with the fear of what it is supposed to do. We must not assume that every reported effect is imaginary, but neither should we assume that the explanation offered by the person reporting it is necessarily correct."

Michael looked back towards the Town Hall, the place where we had heard the concert.

"Then the instrument was not necessarily dangerous. People believed it was dangerous, and the belief may itself have influenced their experience."

"That is one possibility," Arthur said.

"Or," I added, "the instrument was genuinely capable of producing an effect upon some listeners, though the nature of that effect was misunderstood."

Helena turned to me.

"You have moved from heaven to madness in the space of a few streets."

"I have always admired a well-constructed route."

"Your routes," she said, "are generally constructed after you have arrived at the destination."

I accepted this as a fair criticism.

There was another theory which had occasionally been offered to explain the supposed dangers of the instrument: lead poisoning. Some glass harmonicas were made from lead glass, and it was suggested that performers might absorb harmful quantities of lead through contact with the bowls.

Arthur was acquainted with the argument.

"The difficulty," he said, "is that the mere touching of lead glass does not establish a significant route of exposure. Lead poisoning was certainly common in earlier centuries, but lead was encountered in many other places: paint, medicines, cookware, food preparations, and various domestic objects. If a musician became ill, the instrument was only one possible explanation among many."

"Which means," Helena said, "that a person could be poisoned by an ordinary household object and then blamed for listening to the wrong sort of music."

"Or," said Michael, "a person could become ill for reasons nobody understood, and the world would invent a story to make the illness comprehensible."

That sentence remained with me longer than I expected.

We are reluctant to accept suffering without an explanation. When a person grows melancholy, we search for a cause. When a person loses the power to reason, we search for the event which took it away. When somebody dies, we look for the precise moment at which the future became impossible.

Sometimes we find a cause. Sometimes we find a contributing circumstance. Sometimes we find only a story which has the advantage of allowing us to stop asking questions.

The glass harmonica had acquired a reputation for disturbing the mind because its sound was strange enough to invite suspicion. It seemed to come from nowhere; it appeared to possess a purity that ordinary instruments could not imitate; and it was made of a substance which, to the ordinary imagination, belonged as much to fragile ornaments and laboratory vessels as to music.

It was almost inevitable that people should ask whether such a sound could be harmless.

Yet I found myself wondering whether the suspicion contained a truth which had been distorted by the people who repeated it. Not a truth about poison, necessarily, nor about some mysterious power by which glass could drive a person mad. I wondered whether certain kinds of beauty might expose a vulnerability already present in us.

A sound need not cause madness in order to reveal that the mind is not entirely master of itself.

This was a thought I could not have developed that evening. It came to me later, after other losses, and after I had learned how little a person may understand about the workings of his own heart. But its beginnings, I suspect, lay in the strange silence that followed the concert.

I had not yet finished with the heavens.

"Suppose," I said, "that the old language of the firmament describes a boundary between the human world and the dwelling of God. Suppose, further, that the glass harmonica reminds us of the transparency of that boundary. Would it not be natural for people to associate its sound with the passage between earth and heaven?"

Arthur considered this.

"Natural, perhaps. But we must distinguish between an association and an event."

"I am not proposing that the musician opened the heavens by playing."

"That is a relief," Helena said. "I was about to ask whether we ought to have applauded more quietly in case somebody came through the ceiling."

I continued.

"The Bible contains accounts of people who ascend to heaven, or who are taken from the ordinary human world in ways that appear to cross the boundary between earth and the divine presence. Enoch is said to have walked with God, and then to have been taken by God. Elijah is carried away in a whirlwind, in the presence of Elisha, with the famous chariot and horses of fire. The New Testament describes the Ascension of Christ. And Christian tradition, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox tradition in its own distinctive language, speaks of the bodily Assumption or Dormition of Mary, though the traditions do not formulate the matter identically."

Michael looked at me sharply.

"You are comparing a musical instrument with the Ascension?"

"I am comparing the sound with the human imagination of ascent. I have not yet proposed a new article of the Creed."

"Not yet," Helena murmured.

I could see that Michael feared I was about to make the Bible serve as an illustration of a theory I had invented because I liked the sound of it. His concern was justified. There is a form of religious speculation which begins with a text and ends by using the text as a decorative frame around an idea that originated elsewhere. I had seen it in others and, on occasion, recognised its first symptoms in myself.

"Let us take the accounts separately," Arthur suggested. "Enoch first."

Genesis tells us that Enoch walked with God and was not, for God took him. You know, the brevity of the statement has always seemed remarkable to me. There is no description of a long struggle, no account of a journey through the heavens, no inventory of celestial architecture. Enoch simply disappears from the ordinary succession of human lives because God takes him.

Hebrews later says that Enoch was translated so that he should not see death. Whatever precise conclusions one draws from the language, the essential point is that Enoch's departure is presented as an act of God, not as an achievement of human technique.

"Which is important," Arthur said. "If the instrument reminds you of ascent, that does not mean it produces ascent. The biblical event depends upon divine action, not upon a sound or a human ritual."

"Agreed," I replied.

Elijah's departure is more dramatic, instead. In the Second Book of Kings, he and Elisha walk together, and a chariot of fire with horses of fire appears, separating them. Elijah ascends in a whirlwind into heaven, while Elisha watches. The mantle falls, and the prophet's departure becomes inseparable from the grief of the disciple who remains behind.

I had always been struck by that last detail.

Elisha does not merely witness a marvel. He loses his master, his spiritual father. He cries out, and then he takes up the mantle which has been left to him. The miracle is also a separation, and the separation is made bearable, at least in part, by the continuation of a task.

Michael listened with an expression I could not interpret.

"That is different," he said at last. "Elisha sees Elijah go. He knows what has happened."

"Or he believes he knows what has happened," Arthur replied. "The narrative gives him a vision and a sign. It does not give him possession of Elijah."

"Perhaps possession is too strong a word," I said. "But he is not left with nothing. The mantle remains."

"The mantle is not Elijah."

"No. But it is something he can carry."

Helena was quiet for a moment.

"That is a very human way of describing it," she said. "We lose a person and keep an object. We lose a voice and keep a sentence. We lose a life and keep whatever the person has left behind."

I thought of the way we had listened to the harmonica. The notes had seemed to remain in the room after the player ceased to produce them. The sound had departed, but something of its shape lingered in our hearing.

I wondered whether our ideas about heaven had been shaped, at least in part, by this experience of a presence that seemed to linger after its immediate angelic cause had vanished.

I did not say so. The thought was too vague, and I had begun to distrust vagueness when it wore the clothes of theology.

The Ascension of Christ presented a different question. In the New Testament, the risen Jesus appears to his disciples, speaks with them, and is taken up before their very eyes. The Ascension is not merely the disappearance of a body, nor a poetic description of the disciples' grief. It belongs to the Christian account of the risen Christ's exaltation and return to the Father.

Yet the language of ascent invites the imagination to picture a direction: upwards, beyond the visible world, towards the dwelling of God.

"The danger," Arthur said, "is that we imagine heaven as though it were simply a place located at a greater altitude. We then find ourselves asking what lies above the clouds, above the planets, above the stars, and we suppose that the answer must eventually be a physical ceiling."

"I do not see why a boundary, if there is one, must be understood as an ordinary ceiling," I replied.

"Nor do I. But we should not make a physical assertion merely because a spatial image appears in Scripture."

This was precisely the difficulty. The language of the Bible is not indifferent to space, place, height, descent, ascent, and the opening of the heavens. But the theological meaning of these words cannot be exhausted by turning them into a diagram.

I had long been interested in the old cosmologies, and particularly in the picture of the world as a created order bounded by a solid firmament. The modern habit of treating the heavens as a region of indefinitely extending physical space seemed to me, at times, to have made the word heaven more difficult to imagine without making it any easier to understand.

Yet I knew that my dissatisfaction with modern cosmology was not proof of the older model. A man may be dissatisfied with an answer because it is false, because it is incomplete, or because it does not satisfy the kind of question he wishes to ask. Those are three very different complaints.

Helena looked towards the darkening sky.

"Perhaps the difficulty is that you want heaven to be somewhere."

"I should prefer it to be more than an idea."

"So would I," she said, unexpectedly. "But I am not convinced that giving it a ceiling helps."

I looked at her.

"Nor am I convinced that it does not."

That, I think, was the first honest statement of my position.

The glass harmonica had suggested a boundary, but it had not shown me one. Its sound resembled what I imagined the waters above a glass-like firmament might sound like, but resemblance was not revelation. It had brought the old cosmological picture into my mind with unusual vividness. It had not supplied the evidence which would make the picture true.

Still, I could not quite dismiss the association.

There are thoughts which arrive not as conclusions but as guests. One may refuse to give them a permanent room without pretending that they have never crossed the threshold.

It was Helena who brought us back to the instrument.

"You have discussed Enoch, Elijah, Jesus, and Mary," she said. "You have given us a firmament, two sets of waters, and an assortment of celestial departures. But you have not explained why the glass harmonica should be dangerous to the human ear."

"I have not said that it is dangerous to the ear."

"You said it was dangerous."

"I said that the sound might be dangerous in a manner different from the one usually alleged."

"That is a very Timothy-like distinction. I am not sure it improves the situation."

I tried to explain what I meant.

The glass harmonica's notes seemed to me to possess a peculiar capacity to dislocate ordinary expectations. We associate sound with a source, and the source with a position in space. A drum is struck, a string vibrates, a reed is blown. We know, at least approximately, what the instrument is doing and where the sound begins. The glass harmonica seemed to interfere with this confidence. Its sound was sustained, delicate, and almost disembodied. One could hear it clearly without feeling that one had quite located it.

The instrument did not abolish the distance between the listener and the music. It made the distance difficult to judge.

"That is a description of an experience," Arthur said. "What is the danger?"

"Perhaps that we mistake the experience for knowledge."

He nodded.

"That is a danger common to religion, philosophy, and romantic attachment."

Michael objected.

"Romantic attachment is not necessarily a form of error."

"No," Arthur said. "But it is an excellent way of becoming convinced that an error is a revelation."

Helena laughed so suddenly that she had to stop walking.

Michael gave Arthur a look of genuine annoyance.

"That is precisely the sort of cleverness I distrust. You can make almost any human experience sound foolish if you describe it in the right words."

Arthur did not answer immediately. He had the good sense to recognise when a sentence had landed too accurately to be dismissed.

Michael continued.

"People do not always love badly because they are stupid. They may see something true in another person and still misunderstand what it means. The existence of an illusion does not prove that everything which produced it was false."

I remember being impressed by this, although I should not like to suggest that I expressed my admiration at the time. We were young, and the recognition of another person's wisdom was too often accompanied by the suspicion that one was being deprived of an opportunity to display one's own.

"Then perhaps," I said, "the instrument is dangerous because it encourages us to believe that a feeling is a discovery."

"Perhaps," Arthur replied. "But that would make the instrument no more dangerous than a sunset."

"Or a sermon," Helena added.

"Or a person," Michael said.

For a moment, none of us spoke.

It is strange how a conversation may approach the truth from four directions and still fail to recognise it when it arrives. I have since thought that the glass harmonica's supposed danger had less to do with madness than with the unsettling experience of hearing something beautiful which one could not immediately place within the ordinary catalogue of beautiful things.

We like our wonders to have explanations. We are happy to be astonished, provided that the astonishment can eventually be classified. We prefer our mysteries to arrive with a label, a history, and, if possible, an instruction manual.

The glass harmonica offered no such convenience. It made a sound that was recognisably musical and yet seemed to belong to a region of experience that music ordinarily visited only in passing. It was familiar enough to be understood, strange enough to be mistrusted, and fragile enough to make its survival appear almost miraculous.

Perhaps that was why the rumours had gathered around it.

But there was another possibility, one which I found more troubling.

Perhaps the sound reminded people of their own fragility.

The instrument was made of glass. Its beauty depended upon a material which could be broken by a careless movement. Its notes could be produced only by a delicate conjunction of rotation, moisture, pressure, and touch. The player could not simply strike it into obedience. He had to coax it into speaking.

There was something almost theological in that arrangement, though I hesitate to say so, having learned that one can find theology in almost anything if one is sufficiently determined to do so.

Michael would have said that the fragility was precisely what made the instrument beautiful. Arthur would have asked whether beauty depended upon fragility or merely became more noticeable in its presence. Helena would have remarked that we were all becoming sentimental about glass.

All three would have been right.

The passage which returned to me most insistently that evening was not one of the accounts of ascent. It was a passage from the Book of Revelation.

"And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them."

These are the words of Revelation 11:11–12, in the language of the King James Bible.

I had already read them several times before the concert, but the sound of the glass harmonica had made them seem newly strange.

The two witnesses lie dead in the street, exposed to the gaze of those who rejoice at their destruction. Then the Spirit of life from God enters them. They stand upon their feet, and a voice from heaven summons them upwards. They ascend in a cloud while their enemies watch.

The sequence is extraordinary: death, the return of life, standing, a voice, and ascent.

I was struck particularly by the voice.

The witnesses do not ascend because they have discovered a technique for escaping the world. They do not climb a ladder, construct a vessel, or discover a hidden passage through the heavens. They are summoned. The ascent follows the voice.

It occurred to me that the glass harmonica might be imagined as an earthly echo of such a summons. Not the voice itself, and certainly not a mechanism by which a human being might force open the heavens, but a sound which could awaken the imagination to the possibility that the visible world is not the whole of reality.

Arthur was cautious.

"Revelation is not a musical instruction manual," he said.

"I should hope not. I would dislike to discover that the Apocalypse required an orchestra."

Helena smiled.

"Although the trumpet section would at least have sufficient volume."

Arthur continued.

"The voice in Revelation belongs to the vision. The witnesses' ascent is part of the prophetic imagery. You may find the sequence suggestive, but you cannot infer from it that a particular tone or instrument is connected with the event."

"I have not inferred that."

"You have approached the edge of it several times."

"Then I shall step back."

Michael looked at me.

"Do you believe that the witnesses actually rise bodily into heaven?"

"I believe that the passage presents them as bodily rising. I believe that Christian hope cannot be reduced to the persistence of an idea in the minds of the living. Beyond that, one must be careful about the relation between prophetic imagery, the events it signifies, and the manner in which those events are fulfilled."

"You are being evasive."

"Perhaps. But I would rather be evasive than pretend to understand a mystery simply because I have found a sentence which describes it."

This answer seemed to satisfy him, though not entirely.

The passage had acquired a personal significance for me. The dead witnesses do not merely become memories. They are restored to life by the Spirit of God, and they hear a voice calling them upwards. Their restoration is not achieved by the force of their own recollection, nor by the affection of those who remain on earth. It is an act of divine power.

That distinction would become more important to me as I grew older.

For the moment, however, I was thinking about the sound. The harmonica had seemed to offer a faint suggestion of a voice from beyond a boundary. Revelation described a voice from heaven which summoned the dead. Between the two there was no demonstrable connection, but there was an analogy of such force that I found it difficult to put aside.

I imagined the witnesses standing in the street, the world watching them, and a sound descending from above. Not a trumpet blast, nor the thunder of an organ, but something so pure and unfamiliar that the listeners could not tell whether it belonged to the air around them or to the world beyond it.

Then I remembered that Revelation does not say the witnesses hear a glass harmonica.

It says they hear a great voice.

This is the difficulty with religious imagination. It can make a text seem more vivid, but it can also make it say things which it does not say. A faithful reader must sometimes abandon an attractive image for the sake of a less accommodating sentence.

I have always considered that a form of intellectual discipline, and perhaps a form of devotion. If one believes that Scripture deserves reverence, one should not be too eager to make it serve one's private inventions.

Yet the image remained with me: the dead restored, the voice heard, the ascent begun.

I would encounter that sequence again, in a different form, when I began to think seriously about the people who had left my life.

I did not know, as we walked through Carrickfergus that evening, how much of our conversation would eventually become a conversation about death.

We spoke of the instrument's history, its peculiar sound, and the rumours which had followed it. We spoke of the old cosmologies, of the meaning of heaven, and of the strange biblical accounts in which human beings were taken from the earth. We were young enough to suppose that these questions could be discussed in the abstract, as though mortality were a subject one might examine from a safe distance.

Arthur would soon become an absence which I could not repair by thinking more carefully. Helena would leave a void into which even irony, for all its ingenuity, could not reach. Michael would become an absence which would leave me wondering whether moral seriousness had been enough to save him.

I shall not pretend that I foresaw any of this. It would be dishonest to give my younger self the knowledge of my older one, merely to make the story more elegant.

What I can say is that each of them had already revealed something about the way human beings inhabit the world.

Arthur believed that understanding another person was a greater achievement than loving them, and he had the patience to make the proposition seem plausible. Helena preserved the emotional history of her friends as though each life were an archive entrusted to her care. Michael believed that a person's convictions ought to become visible in the way he acted, and that it was not enough to admire justice from a comfortable distance.

Between them, they represented three different ways of resisting the disappearance of things.

Arthur resisted it through understanding. Helena resisted it through memory. Michael resisted it through action.

I did not recognise the pattern then. I saw only three dear friends, each with his or her own habits of mind, each capable of making the others exasperated, each convinced that the world had not yet exhausted the subjects worth arguing about.

But I have often returned to that evening because the glass harmonica seemed, in some obscure fashion, to bring their differences into focus. The instrument produced a sound which could not be held, a sound that existed only while the player continued to coax it from the turning glass. Its beauty was inseparable from its passing.

When the music ended, the instrument remained.

The player remained.

The room remained.

But the sound was gone.

It would have been easy to say that the music lived on in our memories. That is the sort of sentence which appears comforting until one examines it closely.

What does it mean to say that a sound lives on in memory? It means that the mind can, under certain circumstances, recover an impression of what it heard. It does not mean that the sound continues to exist in the world, nor that the mind's recollection is a perfect reproduction of the original experience. Memory preserves by transforming. It gives us the past in a form we can bear to revisit, but it does not return the past itself.

We may remember a voice and still fail to recall its precise timbre. We may remember a face and discover, upon seeing an old photograph, that the image in our minds has been altered. We may remember a conversation with such confidence that another participant's account seems impossible, until we discover that we have each preserved a different version of the same afternoon.

Memory is not a recording device. It is an activity of the living mind.

For many years, I accepted the familiar consolation that the dead live on in the memories of those who loved them. I did not consider the statement entirely false. It is plainly true that a dead person's influence may continue in the living. A habit acquired from a father, a phrase borrowed from a friend, a kindness imitated without conscious recollection of its origin: these may be forms of survival in the ordinary human sense.

But they are not the survival of the person himself.

The distinction seemed academic when I was young. It became less so as I grew older.

There is a particular cruelty in the way memory can fail. We tend to imagine that the past, once experienced, remains somewhere within us, available to be recovered if we can only find the proper key. Yet the mind is not a library whose books are guaranteed to remain upon their shelves. It is a living faculty, dependent upon the health of a living body, and it may be damaged, diminished, or deprived of powers which we had assumed belonged to us permanently.

I have become increasingly conscious of this in recent years, through my reading about Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, but also through the painful experience of watching friends and colleagues contend with illnesses that gradually rob a person of the very faculties by which we recognise them. These are modern additions to my private meditations, not conclusions I could have drawn from that evening in Carrickfergus. They have nevertheless forced me to revisit a question which I once considered settled.

What becomes of the person who can no longer remember being himself?

The question is not merely medical. It is also philosophical and, for a Christian, theological.

A man may forget his childhood, his wife, his children, his friends, and the events which formed his character. He may lose the ability to recognise his own face in a photograph. He may forget the words of a prayer which he once recited daily, or fail to recognise a church in which he worshipped for half a century. In advanced illness, he may lose the capacity to express the thoughts and affections by which others once knew him.

We continue to recognise him as the same human being, even when the thread of their remembered life has become inaccessible to them; and yet, almost imperceptibly, we begin to speak of him in the past tense, as though the person we love were already receding from the world while still inhabiting it: "Dad had a particular weakness for chocolate cake," or "my husband would often stroll beside the lake on those mild spring evenings."

If his identity depended entirely upon his ability to recall himself, we should face a terrible difficulty. The person who had forgotten his past would have lost, in some important sense, the very foundation of his own identity.

But that is not how we understand him. Nor, I think, is it how we ought to understand him.

The human person is not simply the sum of his recollections. He is not a collection of remembered experiences which happens, for a time, to be arranged into a coherent narrative. Memory matters profoundly, but it is not the sole ground of human dignity or existence.

A man who has forgotten his friends is not thereby absolved of his former friendships, nor made unworthy of their affection. A mother who no longer recognises her children has not rendered her motherhood a fiction. The loss of memory changes the experience of a relationship, sometimes devastatingly, but it does not establish that the relationship never existed.

I have come to think that this distinction bears directly upon our hope for the dead.

Christians sometimes say that a person survives because he is remembered by God. The expression is a powerful one. It offers a consolation more substantial than the hope that our descendants will speak kindly of us after we have gone. God, we suppose, does not forget. What has vanished from the minds of men remains known to the mind of the Creator.

But the thought has begun to trouble me in a way I did not anticipate.

What does it mean to be remembered by God?

If I am remembered merely as a complete collection of facts, then the consolation appears strangely impersonal. God might preserve an exhaustive account of my life without preserving me. He might know every word I have spoken, every affection I have felt, every thought I have entertained, and every error I have committed, without that knowledge being equivalent to my continued existence.

A good historian may know a dead king in extraordinary detail without bringing him back to life. A philatelist may possess a stamp which has survived its original owner by a century, but the stamp does not thereby preserve the owner. Knowledge of a person and the existence of a person are not the same thing.

I have spent much of my life collecting stamps, and I have occasionally found myself wondering whether my attachment to them contains a small lesson in the limitations of memory. A stamp may preserve the mark of a vanished administration, the portrait of a dead monarch, or the evidence of a journey whose participants are now forgotten. It is an object through which the past becomes visible. But the object is not the past, and it is certainly not the person who once held it.

God's knowledge, of course, cannot be compared straightforwardly with a historian's knowledge or a collector's possession. The comparison fails because Christian theology understands God not merely as an observer of created things, but as their Creator and sustainer. Nevertheless, the distinction has helped me to recognise the inadequacy of a certain popular way of speaking about eternal life.

To say that God remembers us may be true, but it cannot, by itself, explain resurrection.

The Christian hope is not simply that God retains a flawless account of every life. It is that God is able to give life to the dead. The distinction is essential. If the dead survive only as objects of divine recollection, then we have preserved the record while losing the person. If God raises the dead, then the promise concerns the person himself, not merely the information by which his earthly life can be reconstructed.

I do not pretend to understand how this is accomplished. I do not know how personal identity persists through death, nor how the risen body is related to the mortal body which preceded it. I do not know what the experience of resurrection will be like, or whether the restored person will possess memories in a form comparable to those by which we recognise our own past.

But I am increasingly reluctant to make the completeness of human memory a condition of divine fidelity.

If a person can lose his memory during life without thereby ceasing to be a person, why should the loss of memory at death be the decisive obstacle to his restoration?

If a man with advanced dementia remains the man whom his friends love, even when he can no longer remember them, then his identity must rest upon something more fundamental than his ability to summon the past into consciousness.

And if that is true of the living, I see no reason to assume that God would require the dead to retain their memories unaided in order to be raised.

The question is not whether God can remember the dead. I have little difficulty believing that He can. The question is whether divine remembrance is merely a form of perfect recollection or whether it belongs to the larger reality of God's power to create, sustain, and restore life.

I am inclined towards the latter, though I confess that the distinction has left me with more questions than answers.

Perhaps that is appropriate. The hope of resurrection would be a curious thing if it required us to understand in advance the means by which it will be accomplished.

I sometimes think of Arthur in this connection. He had an extraordinary capacity for remembering arguments, not merely their conclusions but their movements: the qualification introduced halfway through a sentence, the objection which had been overlooked, the small concession upon which the entire structure of a disagreement depended. He could return to a conversation months later and resume it as though the interval had been no more than a pause for tea.

What would remain of Arthur if that faculty were taken from him?

The question is cruel, but it is not meaningless. Suppose an illness had deprived him of the ability to remember the arguments he had made, the books he had read, or the people with whom he had discussed them. Would he have ceased to be Arthur? Would his patience, his gentleness, and the particular quality of his intelligence have become mere historical facts, preserved only in the memories of others?

I cannot believe that the answer is so simple.

The Arthur I knew was not merely the collection of propositions he could recall. He was the person who listened, the person who waited for another human being to finish speaking, the person whose presence made a conversation feel worth having. Memory enabled him to exercise those qualities, but it did not manufacture his entire humanity.

Helena presents the problem differently. She remembered the emotional histories of her friends with extraordinary precision. She knew the small particulars which other people overlooked, and she treated them as though they mattered. To be loved by Helena was to be remembered in detail.

Her death deprived me of that peculiar form of attention. No one else could reproduce it exactly. Even if another friend remembered the same facts, the act of remembering would not be Helena's.

If I say that she lives on in my memory, I must acknowledge that I am the custodian of something which was once active and independent. I preserve the recollection of her laughter, but I cannot hear her laugh at my next mistake. I remember her judgement, but I cannot ask her to judge a new situation. I retain her irony, but I cannot discover whether she would have found the world more absurd or less absurd than she once did.

Michael presents the deepest difficulty of all. He was a man of action, and his life was shaped by convictions which demanded expression in the world. To remember Michael is to remember not only what he believed but what he did, and what he hoped to do. His future mattered to him. It mattered to those who knew him. His death destroyed possibilities which memory cannot restore.

In the case of each friend, the consolation that they survive in memory seems both true and inadequate. They have not vanished entirely from the world, because their influence remains. Yet they are not present in the way that matters most to friendship.

This is why I have grown suspicious of the phrase living on in our hearts. It is not false, but it can become a polite way of avoiding the harder question. A person may live on in the habits, affections, and memories of those who survive him. But does he himself live on? Is the person whom we loved merely the effect he produced in us, or is he more than the sum of those effects?

Christianity answers that human life is not exhausted by its earthly history. Its answer is resurrection, not the indefinite preservation of a sentimental portrait.

The promise does not remove the grief. It gives the grief somewhere to go.

I have sometimes wondered whether this was part of what I heard in the glass harmonica.

Not a revelation, nor a message sent from heaven, but the unsettling awareness that a sound could be absent and yet leave the mind reaching towards it. The music was gone, but the listener was altered. The instrument had ceased to speak, but the experience had not been erased.

That is not resurrection. It is not even a proof of survival. It is merely an illustration of the way an event may continue to matter after it has ceased to occur.

Yet perhaps illustrations have their uses, provided we do not mistake them for demonstrations.

By the time we parted that evening, our arguments had become less conclusive and more personal.

Arthur thought that the rumours about the glass harmonica revealed the human tendency to confuse an unfamiliar experience with a dangerous one. Helena thought that the instrument's reputation had been enlarged by the sort of people who preferred a good ghost story to an ordinary explanation. Michael suspected that the stories concealed a more uncomfortable truth about the fragility of the mind, and that we ought not to dismiss suffering merely because its cause was uncertain.

I remained caught between the beauty of the sound and the uncertainty of its meaning.

We had begun with an instrument. We had ended with death, resurrection, memory, and the possibility that the heavens might not be exhausted by what we could see.

I should like to say that we arrived at a conclusion, but we did not. We were young, and we had the advantage of believing that every unfinished argument could be resumed on another evening. We parted with the easy confidence of people who had not yet learned how frequently a conversation may be interrupted for the last time.

I have often returned to the image of the glass harmonica's rotating bowls. The player touches the rims, and the instrument answers. The sound depends upon contact, yet it seems to rise beyond the place where the contact occurs. There is something almost paradoxical about the arrangement: a material object produces a sound which appears to belong to a world of extraordinary delicacy, and the listener is left wondering why the ordinary properties of matter should have produced something so elusive.

Perhaps the mystery lies not in the sound but in our expectations of what matter ought to be capable of producing.

Perhaps it lies in the listener.

Or perhaps the instrument is simply an instrument, and the rest belongs to the imagination of a young man who had read too much theology and possessed an unfortunate tendency to look for the firmament whenever the weather permitted.

I have not entirely ruled out that last explanation.

I have also not entirely abandoned the others.

There are evenings, here in Cumbria, when I remember that concert so clearly that I can almost hear the notes again. I picture the player seated before his delicate arrangement of glass, his fingers moving with patient precision, and the room falling quiet around him. I remember Arthur's thoughtful expression, Michael's seriousness, and Helena's amusement. I remember the arguments which followed, and the ease with which we believed that the next conversation was already waiting for us.

But I cannot recover the sound itself. I can only recover my recollection of it.

That distinction has become more important to me than it once was.

I no longer believe that the music offered evidence for a glass firmament, nor that the instrument possessed a secret power to open the heavens. I cannot say that angels also play the glass harmonica, or that the sound we heard that evening was identical with the music of heaven. Those remain images, and I should be ashamed to present them as discoveries.

Yet I remain persuaded that the concert revealed something about the human desire to hear beyond the limits of ordinary experience.

We hear a voice and wonder whether it will continue after the speaker has gone. We watch a friend disappear from our lives and wonder whether the relationship has become nothing more than a memory. We observe a person lose the power to remember himself and wonder what remains when the narrative of a life can no longer be told by the person who lived it.

And we look at the heavens, whether through the old language of the firmament or through the vast distances of modern astronomy, and ask whether the visible world is the whole of reality.

These are not the same question. I have no wish to pretend that they are. But they share a common anxiety: the fear that what has become inaccessible has ceased to exist.

Christian hope asks us to consider another possibility. The fact that we cannot recover the dead by our own powers does not establish that God cannot raise them. The fact that a human mind may lose its memories does not establish that the person has become worthless, or that his life has been erased. The fact that a sound has ceased does not mean that it never occurred, though neither does its remembered beauty prove that it continues to sound somewhere beyond the world.

I find myself returning to the words of Revelation: the Spirit of life from God enters the dead, they stand upon their feet, and they hear the summons, "Come up hither."

The sequence remains mysterious to me. It does not tell me how resurrection works, nor does it provide a diagram of the heavens. It does not tell me whether the firmament is made of glass, whether the waters above it possess the properties I once imagined, or whether any musical instrument can offer more than an analogy for the sound of a voice from beyond our present understanding.

But it does tell me where the hope lies.

Not in the power of the dead to remember themselves.

Not in the power of the living to preserve them perfectly.

Not in the ability of an instrument, however beautiful, to make a passage through the heavens.

The hope lies in the God who gives life.

And perhaps that is why the memory of the glass harmonica has remained with me. Its sound was delicate, strange, and brief. It seemed to come from a place beyond the room, and when it ceased, we were left with the ordinary world and our unfinished arguments.

We did not know that we were practising for grief.

Arthur would have asked me to distinguish between what I knew and what I merely believed. Helena would have warned me against making a beautiful story out of an inconvenient fact. Michael would have asked what my beliefs required me to do for the people who were still alive.

I hear all three questions whenever I return to that evening, and I remain grateful for them.

I should like to imagine that, somewhere beyond the limits of our present understanding, the conversation continues. But I do not need to imagine that Arthur is still arguing, that Helena is still laughing, or that Michael is still demanding an answer in order to believe that their lives mattered beyond the years in which I knew them.

Nor can I prove that the conversation continues merely because I long for it to do so.

That is the difficult distinction between memory and hope. Memory looks backwards and attempts to preserve what has been. Hope looks forward towards what has not yet been given. Memory tells me that my friends existed, that they altered my life, and that I cannot bring them back by recalling them. Hope permits me to believe that their disappearance from my experience need not be the final word upon their existence.

I have no wish to make the glass harmonica responsible for that hope. It was an instrument, not a sacrament. Its sound may have unsettled the nerves of some listeners, delighted others, and inspired a young man in Carrickfergus to imagine the waters above a glass-like firmament. It may have disappeared from fashionable concert halls because its voice could not compete with louder instruments. Its fragility may have contributed to its decline. The rumours of madness may have exaggerated ordinary melancholy into legend.

All of these explanations may contain some part of the truth.

But none of them explains why, so many years later, I remember the silence after the final note.

Perhaps it was simply the silence of an audience waiting to applaud. Perhaps it was the moment in which the sound, having ended, became a memory. Or perhaps I have given an ordinary silence a significance it never possessed, because I have spent a lifetime attempting to understand the absences which followed it.

I cannot decide.

I only know that, when I remember that concert, I do not remember four young people who solved the mystery of a strange instrument. I remember four young people who had not yet learned how much they would one day wish to say to one another.

We were listening to music, and we were discussing heaven. We were debating whether a sound could disturb the mind, whether a boundary might separate the visible world from the divine, and whether the dead might be summoned into life again. We believed that the arguments could be continued at our convenience.

The music ended. We went home.

And time, which had permitted me to believe that the future belonged to me, continued its quiet work.

If the glass harmonica taught me anything, it was not that the heavens are made of glass, or that angels produce the same notes which we heard in Carrickfergus. It was that the most delicate experiences may leave the most persistent questions, and that the disappearance of a sound does not give us the right to declare its meaning exhausted.

I still believe that God remembers the dead. I am less certain than I once was about what people mean when they say so. I suspect that divine remembrance must be something greater than the preservation of a perfect archive, for an archive, however complete, is not a resurrection. If we are to hope for life beyond death, we must hope for more than the survival of our biographies.

We must hope for the restoration of the persons whose biographies they were.

Whether the firmament is as I once imagined it, whether the waters above it possess a physical reality, and whether the music of heaven resembles the glass harmonica are questions I cannot answer. I have grown wary of certainty in matters where my evidence consists chiefly of a sound, an association, and a longing.

But I remain persuaded that the world is not made less mysterious by our refusal to invent explanations for its mysteries.

The instrument has fallen silent. My friends have gone. The young man who heard that music has become an older man, still inclined to speculate, still inclined to doubt, and still occasionally inclined to mistake a beautiful image for the beginning of an argument.

I hope I have become a little better at recognising the difference.

And if, one day, the dead are indeed summoned by a voice from heaven, I do not suppose that I shall need a glass harmonica to recognise it. I shall not need Arthur to explain its nature, Helena to test its claims, or Michael to ask what it requires of me.

I hope only that, when the summons comes, the conversation will be permitted to continue.

For if the greatest melancholy is that of things that never happened, the greatest hope, perhaps, lies in the possibility that what was interrupted may yet be resumed.