This is the first of five letters that shaped Letters To My Daughters, my new work for cello and piano. I wrote it early in the process of creating the piece, at the same time that the sound world was beginning to come into focus. These letters each say something about the world now, but also something that I hope my daughters will return to one day.
More soon.
First Letter: Ring All the Bells
To my daughters:
There are many things in our personal and collective lives which remain out of reach. Some things, like athletic or musical excellence, are out of our reach because they are notoriously difficult for individuals to achieve. I once wanted to be a professional baseball player, but I am not one because I was not good enough at baseball. I am not a great pianist (although I appreciate that you think I am) because I didn’t practice the piano enough when I was young. Other things, like curing cancer or fusing atoms together or traveling to other stars are beyond our capacity as humans, or at least they are in 2025 as I write this letter to you.
But there is a wide field of action that is possible between these personal and global challenges. In this opening are things which we avoid because nobody has organized the rest of us to do them. So much of the richness and beauty and connectedness in life happens at this overlooked, unloved medium scale.
There is a thought experiment that I think of often, but have never put into action because I do not have the energy or the willpower. Maybe someday I will. I imagine a day on which the citizens of Philadelphia, where we live, agree to ring every bell in the whole city all at once: the bells of the churches and cathedrals, of course, but also the little bells that people have in their homes and the old-fashioned alarm clocks and the decorative sleigh bells for Christmastime and all the rest of them, on and on, large and small. This festival of bells would be spectacularly beautiful, but we haven’t done it. It does not evade us on a technical level: we know how to make and ring bells. It does not evade us on a financial level: the bells already exist and it costs nothing to ring them. It doesn’t require new forms of social or political organization: all of our society’s problems would still be there the day after we rang the bells. It’s just something that would be exquisitely lovely but which we haven’t done because nobody has helped us do it.
Last year, there was a total solar eclipse which passed over some parts of our country. You both watched it at school using these silly cardboard goggles which millions of us bought, used once, and then threw away. My colleagues and I watched it while laying on the lawn behind my office—something which we would never have done under any other circumstances—where you sometimes do cartwheels when you come to visit me at work. We felt the warmth of the sun disappear and saw the stars and heard the animals which usually only come out at dusk. Some people who experienced it described understanding their relationship to the cosmos in a completely new way, a moment where the hidden relationships between things on a vast, inhuman scale were suddenly made visible.
Unexpected, large-scale acts of cooperation do the same thing. They reveal the hidden connections between ourselves and others, they bring us all out in the open, and they give us something to talk to each other about. Think about it: how many bells are hiding out there that you don’t know about? As soon as they started ringing, I know you would feel something about the city around us that you’d never felt before. You would stand on our rooftop and see your surroundings in a new way. Features of the landscape which had always been meaningless to you might now matter in some small way.
These bells are my flight of fancy. What is yours? What else remains undone, for no good reason, at an unexpected scale? What else could we do if someone brought us together and inspired us to do it?
I love you so much,
Dad