To love anything — a person, a pond, the world — is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model.

Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.

“In the great silence of the brackish waters behind our homes,” he heard the voices of myriad unknown creatures joining together in something between the buzzing of the nervous system in an anechoic chamber and the wistful moan of the gyaling, the Buddhist oboe. He heard photosynthesis itself — the regular rhythm of plants exchanging oxygen through

This, I suppose, could also be said of love — it just is, a bloom of aliveness within us and between us. Rothenberg’s project, for all its originality at the crossing point of art and science, is above all an act of love — a reverent reminder that we are here to play our small, indispensable part in the symphony of life and to listen wonder-smitten