I agree, I agree

Once again Alex Ross rides to the rescue.  In today's Observer he is asked about the meaning of music: 'I'm looking for music in which I can lose myself, which I can trust, which never fails me ... What the meaning is, that's up to each listener to say.  But I do think that quality of disappearing into someone else's world is so powerful'.  I first had this experience of 'disappearing' when listening to the American group 'Anonymous 4'.  The sound world the four women create is one I want to spend time in, safely wrapped up, soothed, comforted by the music.  Opera has the same effect on me, the Bach cantatas, Beethoven's symphonies, Mozart, Mahler, Haydn piano trios.  It works with Laurel and Hardy too.  There are occasions when I just have to spend time in their company, relax into the safe yet anarchic comic world they create.   Or Woody Allen, Larry David, Seinfeld.  Less so with Chaplin whose films always seem to have a harder, darker, more troubling and unsettling edge to them:  Buster Keaton I enjoy more.  With books it is C.S. Forester, Dickens, Jane Austen, Conan Doyle or Just William.  Although Dickens certainly has a darker, more troubling edge than anything Richmal Crompton ever wrote.  Or biographies, especially of writers, composers, explorers and scientists, painters.  Never generals or political leaders.  By and large I despise these people, with only a few exceptions (Nelson Mandela for example).  Generals earn their stars by being efficient at giving orders and harming or killing large numbers of  people.  Politicians likewise.  Neither category is renowned for being honest and candid.  Both enjoy the untrammeled exercise of power and authority.  Both believe they have a right to do what they do by virtue of superior intellect, ability, knowledge, judgement.   Why on earth would I want to spend any time at all inside their world?  A plague on both their houses!  William would have known how to deal with their sort.