Listening to the Gramophone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 38, 15 March 1940, Page 12

Listening to the Gramophone

RYONE has watched a child gazing at a visitor, and gazing and gazing, till his curiosity can be restrained no longer. At last he speaks: What is that funny thing on your face (if the visitor has a mole)? Why is your belt so tight (if the visitor is fat)? Why does your leg stick out like that (if the limb is artificial)? Most people, too, have had experience of the listener who asks, after a profoundly moving gramophone record, if wooden needles always scratch like that; of the visitor to an art gallery who asks how much the frames cost; of the man who remembers nothing of a sermon or a speech but the motions of the speaker’s Adam’s apple. We are of course all children part of the time, and all scatterbrained most of the time. We gaze at the tree when we are shown the wood, criticise the uniform when we should be estimating the man. But neither childishness nor ignorance nor lack of thought explains the interest some of us show in our own moles and bulges and wooden legs when we are face to face with people seeking our destruction. Everyone who can read and write and pile two on two knows that Britain has made blunders. Everyone knows that she participated, in years gone by, in the scramble for property and power. The blindest patriot knows that blots remain on those pages. But to search for them and point them out to people who hate us is not mere silliness and perversity. It is perversion and disease. It is fanaticism carried across the borders of sanity, and there are men and women in New Zealand doing it. If we like the music we should forget the needle. If we are so constituted that we can’t forget anything we should put on a record of Dachau. The faintest of faint echoes from that hell-hole will be found on page 9 of this issue,