The Lost Horizon

Earlier, fff asked what is the time horizon we need to stay within the bounds of a human perspective. Gai Eaton, who I was fortunate enough to meet at the Regent's Park Mosque, wrote some wonderful lines on this in his book, King of the Castle (perhaps the most accessible book by a 'perennialist')...

'Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books, their thoughts or their private fantasies.
The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of being trapped without hope of escape.

A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia, entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of assimilation are inevitably weakened and certain numbness sets in; nothing is fully savoured and nothing is properly understood...

Outside of works of art which embody something beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us. '

But is there another kind of horizon we should be talking about? Is Bach possible without some pull to the transcendent (gosh, that does make it sound vague!). A religious person would say that it is not just any old evasion of the self (negation) but an attachment to, affirmation of, a reality that is the ultimate source of value/Truth, namely: God. If there is no 'north' in the 'north of the future' does life collapse into meaninglessness? Not quite the question of: 'is anything permitted?' but, rather, what can we create if we do not have a notion of a Creator (question begging word 'notion' is, of course) ?

I think, to the extent we are modern, we balk at such language and connections. We'd like to believe that despite all the dross there is something wonderful and beautiful in our ordinary lives. 

'I saw there was nothing to learn in the deep north..you get enlightenment where you are'
---E. Bond

But we look on suspicion with anything associated with 'greatness' or the timeless, partly because we want to live just in time (or the world) and perhaps partly because this perspective of order or a bigger picture into which we fit, from which we make sense of our lives-a framework, to use Charles Taylor's word-opens us up to the possibility of paternalism. 'Order' has often been associated with being ordered. The paramount value of freedom, autonomy, sits uneasily with a substantive idea of 'the good' (or value). What we make of our lives is really what it's about. And so, the modern genius must be thought of as rebelling against society, conventions or expressing his or her true self. 

Stokowski has this line which I like a lot. Music is a not just a set of black notes on a piece of paper. Religion cannot be just a text. Without human subjectivity meeting that reality (it is pointless to ask about first movers here) then what is there? Barenboim: the human hand, a sense of 'verticality' meeting the 'horizontality' of the keyboard. 

Again, what happens if there is a loss of this horizon, the notion of verticality? 

Now, question me an answer...