I often walk to music — radio music, that is. I have an iPod but it’s old and barely holds its charge a half an hour. Besides, I haven’t loaded much music on it. In fact, I never really made the switch from LP to CD. Much of my favorite music is on vinyl. So for years I’ve contented myself with whatever our classical station serves up. This is probably just laziness on my part, or perhaps a willingness to be surprised, to take what fate hands me, aurally speaking.

I was thinking of this in terms of what I wrote about yesterday, the “Big Sort.” Not only are we segregating ourselves into homogeneous clubs, churches and communities but we are also reading custom-tailored news and listening to carefully selected music.

The world is big, complex, confusing. We need the comfort of sameness and exclusion. But trying a new activity, listening to unfamiliar tunes or chancing upon an article in the hard copy of a newspaper gives a necessary eclecticism to our lives. It means we’re looking out windows instead of into mirrors.