rain threads on the glass
an empty chair leans forward
the song never comes
Life without music would still carry rhythm. The steady percussion of the heart. The restless tapping of rain against the roof. The groan of an old chair shifting in the night. The world would not go silent. But it would feel hollow, as though someone had reached inside and quietly erased an essential layer.
Days would still arrive. The sun would rise and fall, trains would rumble into stations, conversations would unfold in cafés. Yet without the melodies that wrap themselves around memory, without the music that gives shape to joy and sorrow, time would flatten. It would be like a photograph with the contrast drained, or a painting without shadows. You would recognize the outlines, but the depth would be gone.
I once drove across Slovenia on a highway that stretched endlessly, the horizon always just out of reach. The road hummed beneath the tires, steady, repetitive. The sky above was enormous, too large for the small cabin of the car. The radio was broken that day. Silence filled the vehicle like a fog.
I could still see, still move, still breathe. But nothing tied the experience together. The miles became abstract, unanchored, as if I were floating forward without ever arriving. I realized it wasn’t the road that felt endless. It was the absence of music—the missing thread that might have bound the sky, the horizon, and my restless body into something unforgettable.
Music is not required for survival in the same way food or water is. You can live without it. But without music, you begin to sense that survival is not enough.
When I walk through Bern on quiet evenings, I sometimes notice how certain songs have fused themselves to specific streets. A jazz tune leaking from a basement bar in Tokyo. A folk song drifting through a window in Lisbon. An accordion played by a stranger on a Paris bridge. These songs are not merely sounds. They are memory’s scaffolding. Later, when they return to me—on a radio, in a café—I am transported not just to a place, but to a feeling, a season, even the smell of the air. Without music, those memories would still exist, but they would be pale, flattened into something two-dimensional.
In my old notebooks, I find clues of this over and over. Billie Holiday in a café, rain starting right after. Bach on the train between Kyoto and Hiroshima, mountains flashing like chords. The music is always there, holding the moment in place like pins on a map. Without it, the entries would be little more than logistics. With it, they are alive.
Imagine love without music. The first time you fall, no song to carry it. Imagine heartbreak without the melody that absorbs the silence. Imagine travel without the background hum of discovery, no song to mark the first glimpse of a new city.
The story of life would still unfold. The chapters would remain. But the soul between the lines—the soundtrack that makes the words tremble—would drift away.
I once sat in a tiny bar in Palermo, long past midnight. Only three of us were there: the bartender, myself, and a man half-asleep in the corner. On an old turntable, a record spun, scratched and imperfect. The horn player’s breath was tangled with dust, the trumpet almost breaking into static. None of us spoke. And yet, for those few minutes, the room was not empty. The music bound us together. Without it, we would have been three strangers in silence. With it, we became a kind of temporary family, stitched by rhythm.
That night I understood: music doesn’t just accompany life. It creates the illusion of belonging where none exists.
Even the simplest sounds—a child humming, a pencil tapping against a desk, the steady sweep of a broom—become music if you let them. Take them away, and the world would still function. But it would lose its warmth. Sorrow would last longer. Joy would fade more quickly. Both would lose their echoes.
The absence of music would not feel like silence. It would feel like disconnection.
Think of walking through rain. Without music, it is only rain. With music, it becomes cinema, a scene stitched into something larger. Think of sitting with friends. Without music, it is only conversation. With music, it becomes ritual. Music does not create life, but it amplifies it, transforming the ordinary into something that lingers.
And yet, perhaps, this thought experiment is its own lesson. To imagine the hollow is to recognize the fullness. To realize how unbearable a life without music would feel is to understand how deeply it threads itself through us, how invisibly it works.
So when I hear the first notes of a song drifting from a passing car, or the faint voice of someone singing to themselves on a tram, I pause. I let it reach me. Because I know the alternative.
And I know I don’t want to live in that version of the world.
Last night, walking home after the rain, I passed an alley I’d never noticed before. At the far end, a light glowed. And though no one was there, I swear I heard faint music—something between a piano and a heartbeat, slow and uncertain. I stood there for a while, listening. Then I kept walking, unsure if the sound was memory, imagination, or something the night itself was playing.
Perhaps that is what music is. Not something we create, but something that creates us—appearing at the edge of silence, reminding us we are still alive.
life 
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