Colum McCann

that the hills of Jericho lay in a bath of dark.

And the minbar of Saladin gave me a chance to say that music is liquid architecture.

And another song that Colm resurrected on our travels, Roisin Dove, it gave me a chance to say that Colm's fiddle was capable of opening up the eyelids of a day.

Indeed, music, like the best literature, can open the eyelids of any day and wash the dust off the end of an evening.

Both can capture the pulse of where we are and where we have been.

They are pleasantly ambiguous.

Music even more so, I think, than literature.

They are seldom addicted to absolutes.

Sometimes they can help change people's minds, and sometimes they're just there to soothe our souls.

They're something we shape, and afterwards we are shaped by.

So nowadays, when I write, I listen to Colm's music.

and it enters my words and the words of those around me.

Later this year, he will play at my daughter's wedding in an era that's supposedly so lonely that it's a startling thing to have friendship is beyond words.

But the best friends of all for both of us are those who come to listen and to read.

Life without music or literature would be a solipsistic mistake.

Both of them allow us somehow to live inside somebody else's life.

How this happens, we still do not know.

But through them, we can understand the pain and the suffering of others, and also their joy and their rage.

In the best possible instances, music and literature are an antidote to hatred.

They live, like old Segocious, in the contrapuntal moment of hope.