Jim Olson

2/20/25

I am going deaf.  Heredity, more than anything they claim.  The barriers get a little higher, while those in my orbit raise their tolerance and help in what used to be effortless and what I missed as joyful communication.  What’s becoming lost in addition to that vital daily interaction, is the subtle joy I have carried since early years when experiencing bliss while listening to vocal purity in song, and the power of the spoken word well-articulated.

I could carry a tune when I was younger, and when deep into a book or article, I will still pause, re-reading out loud words that polish the atmosphere around me. Those are the personal sides of such subtle joys.   The more impactful beauty and solace has always been found in others of great talent who give voice in song or oration, and that is what I am losing, the joyful poetry of pitch and tone.   

It is unfair to name some without listing all the world’s past and current fathomless talent, but place yourself in your most comfortable room, and at gentle volume queue up anything by Allison Krause, better yet when in duet of ballads with others.   Such purity of voice in song is bliss defined. 

 Morgan Freeman’s film narrative throughout “The Shawshank Redemption” and James Earl Jones “People will come” speech in the film “Field of Dreams” do not contain Emerson or Tennyson but remain for me the stuff of a life less lived had I not heard them.  Listening to them was as Jones quoted, “as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.”

 Surprisingly, the behind-the-scenes historian and Pulitzer winner David McCullough whom documentarian Ken Burns teamed with relentlessly in bringing a soothingly but powerfully narrative voice to great works was always strikingly soulful.  When I find myself reading, it is more often than not Mr. McCullough who is the voice in my head of the well quoted or well written.  Sample some of his oral works, then read James Thurber’s short story “The Man on the Train” and be the better for the narrative of that surprisingly powerful piece.    I am fortunate to have heard and still hear many such voices, if some, only in my head.   

Toni Morrisson, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”    Give your life full measure while you can.  Find solace, peace, bliss and joy in the language voiced through song, the well written then spoken word.   All you have to do…. is listen.