I believe that Music can be the tipping point that (relatively) permanently transposes the ratio so that the sufferer is now more Matrophilial than matrodeimal.
But it comes not just from hearing the music but Knowing it. Not the composer, the conductor, the orchestra. More than all that — much More.
Not what is heard but what is abstracted through the hearing. And now lives inside the sufferer. Not someone saying “I love you,” but what you hear in your heart forever after.
It is said that when drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes. If so, then at that very instant we suddenly Know why we have lived.
Isaiah Berlin,* elaborating on Archilochus, the ancient Greek poet, states that foxes who “know many things” are scattered in their thoughts, their motives, their actions. Whereas hedgehogs “know one big thing,” they “relate everything to a single central vision … a single, universal, organizing principle.”
We may have lived our whole lives as foxes, but even so, perhaps at the moment of dying, there comes an illuminating clarity: we have all always been hedgehogs but never knew it.
Perhaps we all die as hedgehogs.
* Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 22.