Cantata 143
I recently learned about an influential thinker who, before his death, had grave concerns about an emerging technology. He worried that this new technology encouraged us to outsource memory, to confuse access to information with understanding, and to mistake efficiency for wisdom. He feared that it might weaken habits of deep learning, producing people who appear knowledgeable without truly knowing, fluent without being formed. While it promised intellectual power, he suggested, it risked leaving the human mind thinner rather than richer.
Interestingly, this thinker was Socrates, and the emergent technology was reading and writing.
I read about Socrates in the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brainby Maryanne Wolf, which explores how human beings learned to read and how that learning has changed our brains. Wolf begins with an obvious but surprising claim: we were never born to read. While speech is innate to us, the
is no built-in reading center in our brains. Reading is a cultural invention: something that must
be taught, practiced, and sustained over time.
That reading is learned is not so remarkable, but how the brain responds to the process is. To learn to read, the brain adapts areas meant for vision, language, memory, and emotion, and weaves them together in a new network. Nothing is erased or replace. Older capacities are retained and repurposed. It is akin to the scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers dump a box of materials onto the tabletop and try to reuse them to make a new connection. In learning to read, the brain literally reorganizes itself.
One consequence of this reorganization is that deep reading teaches us to hold time together. To read well requires memory of what has been read, attention to what is unfolding now, and anticipation and prediction of what is yet to come. Meaning arises only when the past, present, and future are held together in the mind. The reading brain becomes a temporal instrument training us in patience, reflection, and sustained attention.
It is here where my own thoughts turn to music. Sound by itself is immediate and fleeting. Music, it seems to me, is something more than sound. A single note has limited meaning on its own. Its meaning emerges only in relationship to what came before and what the listener expects to hear next. Music unfolds across time, and to listen deeply is to hold multiple moments together at once.
Like reading, music is learned. We are born with extraordinary auditory capacities, but the systems that give music structure–scales, harmony, meter, form–are cultural inheritances. The are taught, practiced and internalized over time. Deep listening is not passive, it is not inherent; it is a skill, shaped by repetition and experience.
This ability to hold time together, the past within the present, the present with the future, is a distinctive human capacity. There is, perhaps, no time where this is more apparent than the New Year. The turning of the year is more than just a date. It is a ritual act that depends on memory and imagination. We look back on what has been, with gratitude or regret. We look forward to what may happen, with hope or uncertainty. And we stand in the present, aware that something old is giving way to something new.
Tonight’s cantata, BWV 143 was written for the sacred feast of the New Year, a day Christians have marked for centuries as a significant threshold. These observances are communal acts of temporal awareness, reminding us that new beginnings do not erase what came before, and that hope cannot exist apart from memory.
So, what should we think about as we listen to Bach’s music this evening? The question is not whether new technologies change how we learn or remember—they always do—but whether we allow them to replace the deeper human work of remembering itself. Memory is not merely the storage of information; it is the slow, lived practice of holding meaning over time, of returning to what matters most. Bach’s Cantata 143, written for the turning of the year, stands within that tradition of sacred remembrance: a musical act of praise that looks backward with gratitude and forward with trust. As the calendar turns and tools evolve, the deeper calling remains unchanged—to remember who we are, whose we are, and to treasure and sustain those great and beautiful things handed down through memory.