Word, Number & Music

by S. M. Hutchens

A person with my blessings has a hard time imagining a home in which children do not hear reading and are not read to, even prenatally. The cadences of ordered meaning should be with them, in them, and growing from their beginnings to a supernal End. The intuition of number, with which all are born, is, by education, not taught so much as recognized, named, and applied. Combine the intuition of number and the cadence of ordered meaning and one has music. A mother singing a melody to her unborn child is fitting him for greater glories, first perhaps of Mozart and Bach, and finally of heaven, whence all this comes and to which it returns.

S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.

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