I was talking to a musician friend the other day about the music of Beethoven, who is my all-time favorite composer. I noticed myself saying things in the present tense, "Beethoven does this" and "Beethoven does that", and suddenly realized: I think of Beethoven as someone who is alive. I have gotten to know old Ludwig so well through his music that he seems more real and more intimate to me than some people I actually see in the flesh on a regular basis.

I don't mean to say that getting to know someone through their artistic creations is the same as getting to know them in person. It is abstract. It is limited. It is not interactive. It cannot compare to the multi-sensory richness of a mother tucking a child into bed. But by the same token, I think there's something available when getting to know someone through their art that is unavailable when getting to know them through interaction. Could the emotions that Beethoven's music stirs in me ever be felt by interacting with Beethoven? The dynamism, the grandeur, the heroism? Would I ever get goosebumps while having coffee with Beethoven?

Interacting with Beethoven personally might actually get in the way of or at least be irrelevant to what I get from listening to his music. By all accounts, Beethoven had a fairly irascible temperament. Of course, I'd probably be cranky, too, if I had his musical genius and found myself losing my hearing starting at the age of twenty something. His music certainly bears the unmistakable stamp of his individuality. It's eccentric and quirky. Once you get to know his style, you recognize it immediately. And yet, at the same time, there is something fundamental and universal in it; something capable of touching millions of people for over two centuries. It is this universality that makes him great. And it's the individuality of his music that makes me feel I know him personally, and not that I merely know some idealized form. An old friend of mine once said to me, "The late string quartets are so intimate that I feel like I could reach out and lay my hand on Beethoven's forehead."

Of course, no matter how well I feel I've gotten to know Beethoven, Beethoven can never get to know me. Having died in 1827, he would have found it difficult to imagine the life I lead as a computer programmer and telecommuter in the 21st century. On the other hand, Beethoven knew some very important things about me before I was even born. Because of the humanity we have in common, he knew what would move me, what would resonate in my soul.

In 1982, I was travelling in France and visited some caves containing paintings created perhaps 15,000 years ago. That's another story. But the part that is relevant here is that I could look at those paintings and respond to them directly, be touched by them, without any need for interpretation. The aesthetic with which they were created was not in any way alien. Those paintings were made by people who were, in the ways that matter most, just like me. And the particular artists who made those paintings, with all their individual quirks of style, were skilled enough that they were, however inadvertently, able to communicate something fundamental across the millenia. In some small way I could get to know someone from a very different culture, and utterly another time, through their art.

Hello there, Oog. Hello there, Ludwig.