By Eric Marks

Alone in the snow I could face for the last time the last question of all. Why, really, had I done it? Why, truly, had I walked from the Camargue to the high Alps? What I sought might have been behind any hedge I walked past, within any clump of trees I glanced at. But I could not believe the universe would play such games. More likely it was still beyond the next mountain; or, if not, the next but one; or, most likely perhaps, behind the one that could not quite be seen, hazy and indistinct on the horizon. And perhaps beyond that there is peace and serenity and understanding, and even the answer to the very last question of all: since we must die, why must we live first?
-Bernard Levin, "In Hannibal's Footsteps"

I have received much sympathy and many letters, but yours is somehow unique in that it speaks of the beauty that is lost rather than condoling with the comparatively useless life that continues on. She was everything you say, and more. She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound.
-Raymond Chandler,on the death of his wife, Cissy

IT'S A WET, quiet night here in the gulf - calm and gentle, elegiac, almost. It suits the season.

With the first anniversary of Sept. 11 just past, we've formally entered the Grieving Season, the remaining points on the calendar being Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en and Nov. 11. If spring builds naturally toward some archetypal celebration of rebirth, be it Easter or May Day, then autumn is one long drawing down of the curtain, and always has been. I'm of the opinion it should be celebrated; that it's healthier, in fact, to pause for reflection on the big question - the only question, when you come right down to it.

Jack Kerouac, that self-consciously morbid sentimentalist who loved the New England autumn so, wrote, "Everyone goes home in October." For Kerouac, this was self-fulfilling prophecy - he checked out Oct. 21, 1969 while watching TV and eating a can of tuna. It must have been anticlimactic, after writing so many lyrical accounts of the terror he endured whenever he thought about his own mortality. Proof that in death, as in so many things, it's not where you arrive at that matters, so much as the journey itself.

Of course, the journey would be easier to undertake if it were better understood.

Centuries ago, the poet Rumi wrote that we are disordered birds, locked in the cages of our bodies, waiting to be let out into the garden again. It's a satisfying metaphor, which is why "I am a bird in God's garden" is almost as well known today as MacBeth's less optimistic observation, "Life's but a walking shadow..."

Art helps us frame the mystery, but it cannot help us fathom it. We speak of "causes of death," but death itself is an effect, just as life is. We might as well shrug and exclaim "so it goes!" like Kurt Vonnegut's affable creation, Kilgore Trout - or perhaps "Croatoan," the word Sir Walter Raleigh's traders found carved into the stockade timbers at Roanoke in 1590 after the settlement's inhabitants had vanished.

Faced with such impenetrability, all we can do is ponder the mystery of being at all and the memory of a harmony that's felt, more than heard - the music at the edge of sound.

THE MUSIC heard faintly at the edge of sound. More than forty years after he wrote it, that casual phrase of Raymond Chandler's still catches the imagination, expressing so emphatically the notion of an order within the chaos of our lives, the order from which Sir Isaac Newton extrapolated the existence of a divine watchmaker, and Rumi, a divine gardener.

It doesn't require any particular faith to accept that we are born into a world we have not made and cannot fully comprehend, but which exhibits certain orderly qualities. To speculate further is to lurch from ontology into theology or cosmology or madness.

What reminded me of Chandler's comment this week was a public radio interview with Adam Goddard. Goddard is a 29-year-old composer and documentarian who lives in Toronto. If you've heard of him, it's likely because of a 60-minute musical feature he wrote entitled "More About Henry."

Goddard's genius is that he can hear the music at the edge of sound and then emphasize it in ways that allow others to hear it, too. To create "More About Henry," he taped interviews with his grandfather, then wrote an upbeat musical score around the subtle tones and cadences of the old man's voice. Listening to it is like watching someone reach out and open a door one never knew existed: it's magical.

For the past year, Adam Goddard has been composing a requiem for the victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Working from audio tapes of people describing their experiences and reactions, Goddard has stitched together a crazy quilt of voices bordered by music that seems to grow organically out of the words being spoken.

It's not a new idea. Istvan Marta did something similar when he used tapes of Romanian refugees to compose "Doom: a Sigh." But whereas Marta's string quartet is an almost unbearably horrifying vignette, Goddard's requiem is searching, quieting and strangely satisfying. It speaks to our desire for order as well as the chaos in our experience of life, and does so without diminishing either. Moreover, it celebrates the fundamental nobility of human beings even in the most ignoble of circumstances. No mean task in this dark season.

IF THE JOURNEY is everything, then how we conduct ourselves must play a large part in determining what we get out of life. Seneca pegged it two millennia ago when he lamented, "Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the power of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long."

Noble is as noble does. Right living is no more nor less than the first principle common to most religions and moral philosophies: "do no harm." It's a precept that can be followed by anyone in any place at any moment, though it is by no means simple.

Perhaps intuiting the right thing to do at any given moment begins with this: learning to listen to the music of what happens. It's in the world around us, in our lives and in our hearts.

How we choose to live answers the question "why live." We climb the mountain not because the mountain is there, but because we are here. And, in the memorable phrase of Richard Brautigan, "so the wind won't blow it all away."

-Eric Marks is a full-time editor and part-time writer whose essays and poems have been published in canada, the U.S. and the U.K. He lives a stone's throw from the Gulf of Maine in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.