The idea that “soul is the difference between the whole and the sum of its parts” came to me during college in the mid-1970s at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
That idea appears in Chapter Three of Harmony in Black and White. The chapter, which focuses on Jack Sullivan’s love of music, contains a section about the infatuation that Jack and his sister, Maggie, had with the Beatles.
Jack and Maggie got swept up in “the wildfire spectacle of Beatlemania.” They were mesmerized when the Beatles appeared on television on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and were shattered when the Beatles broke up in 1970. After that, Jack still listened to music by former Beatles members, but it wasn’t the same. He observed that, “no individual member could ever re-create the group’s magic. The whole of the Beatles was so much greater than the sum of Beatles parts. To me, that difference was soul. Soul was the difference between the whole and the sum of its parts.”
At UVA, I was an English major. One day, an instructor assigned my literature class to read Trout Fishing in America, a novel by Richard Brautigan first published in 1967. Brautigan was an off-beat character. After his death in 1984, his obituary in The New York Times called him “a literary idol of the 1960s” and noted that he “became a familiar figure in the Bay Area of California, handing out copies of his poetry on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and in Berkeley.”
I found the book quirky and strangely fascinating, with tight prose and an innovative style. One chapter toward the end, “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” was particularly intriguing.
The book said, “My own experience with the Cleveland Wrecking Yard began two days ago when I heard about a used trout stream they had on sale out at the Yard.”
The narrator took a bus to the yard to see this used trout stream, which was being sold by the foot, with waterfalls, deer, trees, birds, flowers, and grass sold separately. Insects were free with the purchase of at least ten feet of stream. Trout and crawdads also came free with a length of stream. Fishing in the stream was said to be good.
The narrator examined the waterfalls first, stacked upstairs against a wall. One was over 60-feet long. Then, he checked out the portions of stream, in piles of different lengths. He could see trout and crawdads in the cold, clear water.
I thought for a long time about the meaning of that chapter. What was Brautigan trying to say? Of course, a person could not buy a used trout steam in an old wrecking yard. Water and earth and animals and plants could be purchased individually, but the whole of the trout stream was so much more than the sum of its components. That’s what Brautigan meant, I think. The absurdity of buying parts of a used trout stream in a wrecking yard drove home the point. The essence of a trout stream, which visitors absorb through their senses by sitting on a bank or wading into the sun-dappled waters, radiates from the perfect harmony of the stream’s elements.
I decided that the difference between the whole of the trout stream and the sum of its parts was the soul of the trout stream. I wrote in an old notebook, “Soul is the difference between the whole and the sum of its parts.”
About five years ago, I came across that notebook as I prepared to write my novel.
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