We hear only ourselves.

 

We hear only ourselves.
--
For we gradually become blind to the outside world.
--
Whatever we shape leads back around ourselves again. It is not so much exclusively self-oriented, not so much hazy, floating, warm, dark and incorporeal as the feeling always of being simply with our-selves, simply self-aware. It is material and it is expeience with alien affiliations. But we walk in the forest and feel we are or might be what the forest is dreaming. We pass between the pillars of its tree-trunks, small, spiritual and invisible to ourselves, as their sound, as that which could not become forest again or external appearance of day and visibility. We do not possess it, that which all this around us - moss, curious flowers, roots, trunks and streaks of light - is or sig-nifies, because we are it itself and are standing too close to it, the spectral and still ineffable nature of consciousness or interiorisation. But the sound burns out of us, the heard note, not the sound itself or its forms. This, however, shows us our path without alien means, our historically inward path, as a fire in which not the vibrating air but we ourselves begin to quiver and to cast off our cloaks.
--
Dream, Essays on the Philosophy of Music (1985), p. 1

 

Ernst Bloch

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