A Dollar for Bach

Amid the skateboarders, tourists, street hustlers, and local business people going about their days in Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Plaza - better known as LOVE Park - and with the staccato rhythms of an African drum troupe inspiring the crowds to dance, we battle the park’s massive, splashing fountain for a place to capture clear audio. The recording environment is impossible, but that’s fine. The visual of our first interview beneath the iconic LOVE sculpture will prove far more compelling than anything the microphone catches.

There, an attractive, vibrant, twenty-something woman appears eager to share some adventure when two leather-clad bikers bearing cameras approach her from the milling crowd, introducing themselves as love story hunters from South Dakota who want to hear her thoughts about life and love. Primping her hair as we assure her that we’ll send along a link to the video for her undoubtedly active social media pages, we hit “record” and open with our Big Question: “What is love?”

In all our Journeys to Love interviews and videos, we’ve found the vast range of expression possible on the human face surpassed only by its ability to morph so quickly from one to the next. On hers, you could see clearly as our Big Question fired across the synaptic bridges between the hemispheres and lobes of her brain, seeking purchase. Her expressions evolved wordlessly between confusion, artistic reflection, erotic possibility, and careful consideration. Finally, she abandoned her search for words entirely and surrendered with the only reply we’ve heard repeated across all the cultural and geographic miles: “Well, you know it when you see it.”

Indeed, people do seem to know love when they see it. Across more than a hundred thousand miles of gathering love stories, everyone from Amish farmers to Navy submariners has eventually landed on that same answer, delivered with the same blend of confidence and surrender. But it raises the question: what exactly are they seeing? Is it a look, a way of touching, a special light, some immutable way of being together? Do we know it when we see someone in love with their art, their job, their hometown, their cause, or their faith? And if love is truly the same thing everywhere, why doesn’t anyone describe it the same way twice?

There’s an ache hiding inside that puzzle. People are driven to seek and find love - the most meaningful and essential thing in their lives - and while they clearly feel and see its effects, they can’t say precisely what it is. We are desperate to share something we can’t mutually identify. So we each pursue our own private ideal of it instead, an ideal a little different from everyone else’s, and then wonder why the quest gets so fraught with doubt and frustration.

Here is the first clue we’ve found tucked inside “you know it when you see it”: it’s contextual. It depends. Encounter love where you don’t expect it, and you’re likely to miss it entirely. For proof, consider the finest field experiment ever run on the subject, courtesy of a man who knows something about the strange kinship between music and love, and about being seen.

Joshua Bell is among the greatest violinists alive, a onetime child prodigy who decided early that music would be his life. “When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story,” he once observed. Bell loves music, and that love gushes forth in his performances; it is palpable, genuine, and wondrous. Which made him the perfect subject for a January 2007 Washington Post experiment in context, perception, and priorities. Ahem. Sorry.

At 7:51 on a Friday morning, in jeans and a baseball cap, Bell set up just inside the entrance of Washington D.C.’s L’Enfant Plaza Metro station, opened the case of his handmade 1713 Stradivarius, an instrument worth about three and a half million dollars, and left it at his feet for tips. Then he began to play. He opened with Bach’s Chaconne, a towering piece some scholars believe Bach composed in mourning for his first wife, Maria Barbara, who died suddenly while he was away. If they’re right, then morning rush hour was offered a love elegy, performed by a master, on one of the most treasured instruments on Earth.

Over the next forty-three minutes, 1,097 people hurried past him. Seven stopped for at least a minute. Twenty-seven contributed $32.17, mostly without breaking stride. Exactly one woman recognized him. She planted herself a few feet away, beaming through the final piece, then added a twenty with his name attached to her thanks.

And then there were the children. The Post’s cameras caught the pattern again and again: the kids tried to stop. They turned toward the sound the way sprouts turn toward a window, and again and again a grown-up hand towed them onward, because the train was coming and the day was already late.

When love appears in the stern of a Venice gondola or the happy dance of a newly adopted shelter dog, we know it when we see it. We’re looking for it in those places. We expect it there. But in the grocery store? In traffic? At parent-teacher conferences? In a train station at ten minutes to eight on a Friday? It’s there. Love is omnipresent and elemental, everywhere we are, all the time, both within and surrounding us. “Knowing it when we see it” turns out to depend on the frame - on our perspectives and our expectations. A concert hall tells us that what we’re about to hear matters. A subway platform tells us it doesn’t. That morning, almost everyone believed the room instead of their ears.

Even Bell eventually arrived at the same verdict, reflecting later that classical music simply doesn’t work when it’s thrown at people rushing to work; it’s “something that needs to be contemplated.” The music didn’t fail. The frame did.

Keith Cromwell, the remarkably loving director of Red Mountain Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, once put his finger on the other half of this for us: “I can lick an ice cream and say, ‘I love this flavor!’ or I can nurture a relationship until it becomes something far deeper that is also a kind of love, but I can’t explain them, I can only know them.”

Keith and the woman beneath the LOVE sculpture were each working the same seam from opposite ends. Nobody’s knowing about beauty is broken here. Not hers, or Bell’s, or likely most of the thousand or so souls who just kept walking past it that Friday. They love someone or something enough to know and feel beauty, and would have wept at Bach’s Chaconne if hearing and seeing it in a hall with better lighting and higher ticket prices. That just shows something Toni and I have learned about those things on the road: it’s the sensing that goes untrained. We learn early where love is supposed to appear; we accept the expectation, and our radar stops scanning for it anywhere else. And we’re not above that when the bikes slow down, and the backwash of life piles up. Ten years and a hundred thousand miles into hunting love stories, we still catch ourselves doing it.

The children in the Post’s video just hadn’t learned the rules yet. Nobody had told them beauty keeps certain hours. So when it turned up in a train station at ten minutes to eight, they stopped for it, and a grown-up hand pulled them past it, because of course it didn’t exist.

Bell packed up at 8:34. By then, a thousand and ninety-seven people had walked through a masterpiece being given away for free. Twenty-seven paid a dollar os so for it. One stayed and shared the wealth.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.