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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

Pärt! I may place him after Bach as one of the rare composers who really captures something about the Universe/Creation itself and not just “feelings” (happy/sad/etc). His music goes beyond just being human. I listen to him about once a month when I feel like imagining myself as a deer walking across an iced-over lake completely alone yet warm with the Presence of the Maker.

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Bach doesn’t do that for me at all ( I hear numbers and structure and can’t help so Bach is purely intellectual to me ), but I agree with you on Part : his music moves me in a way no other composer can. I hear both the peace and chaos of life and the universe in it while floating in a bubble, which sounds mildly ridiculous, but happens to be true.

Edit: maybe Bach captures the structure of the universe while Part gets the feeling of the universe …

The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda the part where Uncle Johann dissects the architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever mutating chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until it finally strikes bedrock.

Cryptonomicon, in case people were wondering. The part where Lawrence figures out computation while listening to an organ performance is (to me) one of the best bits of Stephenson's entire written output.

[Edit] hprotagonist. Very apt.

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