Last week Barnaby’s friend Giovanni invited him to attend a concert at Carnegie Hall. Enjoying his friend’s company, and remembering fondly many young adult evenings spent dozing next to his father on a red velvet seat, Barnaby accepted. (Barnaby and his father used to sit in Box 21 and fall asleep together to gentle chamber music.) Then, all of a sudden, through what he could only classify as a Fundamental Confusion in the Mechanics of the Universe, Barnaby found himself hunched up under the concert hall’s ceiling, his legs folded into some arcane and dangerous yoga posture, wishing for an oxygen tank—and, more to the point, for a very loud white noise machine—as he stared down into the premier performance of a new chorale by Sir Paul McCartney. God save us! God save us all!

It is hard to know where to begin. Reader—dear, gentle reader—please understand that Barnaby is a man of at once violent and tender feelings. I don’t mean like a cowboy, who divides the world into two moral phratries, one containing bad guys and the other little ladies, and assigns his feelings accordingly; he is not double and confusing like a charismatic sociopath, who knocks you down and then tenderly helps you up, and then knocks you down again; he is not even violent and tender like those saints and ideologues who ruthlessly condemn all confusion and evil for the very protection of tenderness itself. No; I mean that Barnaby treats art with the sort of fully-committed gravity that Semitic shepherds once reserved for their high and mysterious God, but at the same time, like some fat, marzipan-loving country priest, who lies awake at night fearing hellfire but rarely mentions it to his parishioners lest he hurt somebody’s feelings, he quails at the thought of condemning anyone’s innocent amusements. And so therefore when he found himself, the other day, in the nosebleed section of Carnegie Hall, looking down on several hundred people who, for all he knew, were heartily enjoying Sir Paul’s relentless cavalcade of self-important banality—not to mention his friend Giovanni, who had suggested the outing in the first place—Barnaby did his best to contain his feelings.

He sat quietly through half a dozen pop songs arranged for tenor, soprano, and strings—an inappropriate use of both the material and the instruments, to be sure, but it was no skin off his nose. If the pretentious but culturally insecure want some easy entree into orchestral music—fine, good enough, good for them. It may be fundamentally dishonest, and ultimately useless; it may be a profoundly misguided confusion of style and substance, the cultural equivalent of building castles on sand—but fine, fair enough, tous les goûts sont dans la nature.

He sat through four short nothings—pleasant, competent, and completely unmemorable sections of orchestrated fluff. They were entirely unexceptionable—good music for getting a massage, even. Something like Corn Pops in a silver tureen.

At intermission, he and Giovanni went into the hallway for a couple of sixteen dollar beers.

“It’s interesting,” said Barnaby, “but not my cup of tea.” God bless Barnaby Sandwich! He had no idea what was in store.

They went back in and crammed themselves into their seats, and in the minutes before the beginning of “Ecce Cor Meum,” Barnaby read this statement in the program:

“One night I was travelling back from a concert with the rest of The Beatles. We were in a terrible blizzard going back to Liverpool and our van skidded off the motorway and down a slope. There was no way we could get back up, and someone said, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ And someone else said, ‘I dunno. Something will happen.’ That became a phrase for us. And sure enough, a lorry driver saw us, stopped, and we all crammed into his cab. It shaped my philosophy: the faith in a benevolent spirit that, I hope, lives in the words and music of Ecce Cor Meum.”

Barnaby bit his lip and said to himself, “Well, gee, if it didn’t betray a vision of the world of such breathtaking and well-nigh blasphemous superficiality, this would be almost sweet.” A projector mounted on the ceiling projected onto the wall behind the choir an intertwined “E C M” that Barnaby recognized from the program as Ecce Cor Meum’s album cover. He bit his lip and drew blood.

Then the music began. And reader—dear, gentle reader—I tell you again, it is hard to know where to begin. Shall I begin with the music itself? With the monotonously unsophisticated music that would probably earn a B+ from most high school composition teachers, but would surely fail in college? Or with the words—which, thanks to a benevolent and merciful God, were hard to make out, but which distinctly included such gems as “Spiritus! Spiritus! Teach us to love!” and “Musica! Musica! Fill us with joy!” Or with the scraps of Latin window dressing? Through all of it, Barnaby contained himself—through “Spiritus,” through “Gratia,” through “Interlude (Lament),” through “Musica.” By the end of the last movement, the eponymous “Ecce Cor Meum,” Sandwich was only a hair's breadth away from an explosion into hysterical fury—this movement began with the lines “Ecce cor meum, behold my heart/ Though in the future we may be apart/ Here in my music, I show you my heart,” and proceeded to end with a bang, and a tarum-tum-tum, and a solemn minor third, and another bang, and another tarum-tum-tum, and another solemn minor third, and so on and so on, again and again and again, until Barnaby was trembling and growling and only preserving such stillness as he did by promising himself, “One more fucking note and I’m going to murder every motherfucker in here.”

And then—praise the assembled firmaments and powers—it ended. Barnaby trembled, coughed, and ran down the stairs and out of the building, and up two blocks and into Central Park, and he threw himself at full length into the cold, wet grass to wait for Giovanni. Shortly afterwards, while walking through the park, the two of them discussed whether McCartney was to blame for his vanity, and they decided that in fact the lion’s share of blame must rest with the culture that provides a forum for a man’s work, regardless of its inherent merit, simply because he is already famous. Then they went to the Pierre bar and had a couple of very expensive drinks, and there the whole thing would have ended, if Barnaby had not heard Sir Paul being interviewed on National Public Radio the following day.

Barnaby learned from this interview that the “Lament” movement made reference to the death of McCartney’s first wife. He learned that McCartney’s friends had warned him that the critics would “sharpen their pencils” for him, but he didn’t mind; he could very easily write the sort of “atonal stuff” that would make the critics think he was “really far out,” but that simply wouldn’t be him. And Barnaby learned about the absurd outer limits of Anglophone anti-intellectualism, as a fantastically wealthy Englishman and a vacuous American radio interviewer competed to see who could most completely disavow all knowledge of Latin.

“The title of the piece,” said the interviewer, “is—well, I’d better let you pronounce it.” McCartney had no choice but to do it: “ECK-ay CORE MAY-um,” he said. Score one for Dumb America! Wham! But Dumb England always comes back from behind to win it—McCartney proceeded to explain at length how he had come by his title:

“I was in this church, you see, and there was a picture of Jesus, and beneath it it said, ‘Ecce Cor Meum.’ So I went back to my schoolboy Latin, and I remembered ‘ecce’ meant ‘behold,’ as in ‘Ecce caesar.’ All right, ‘Ecce—behold.’ And then ‘cor,’ I thought it must be like in ‘corona,’ or ‘coronary’—heart! And ‘meum,’ well, that’s pretty simple, ‘mine’—so, ‘Ecce Cor Meum,’ ‘Behold heart mine.’”

Needless to say, this was the part that sent Barnaby out on a ledge to begin carving deep gashes into his “Yellow Submarine” album with a fish knife.

“All these educated people blather on so much about what the world needs,” Barnaby growled at the record, “when it’s all so simple, really, innit? All we need is love! Yes, quite right, you pusillanimous, honey-fed maggot—you know what’s more difficult than producing treacly generalities? Fucking well putting them into practice!” Barnaby wiped his sweaty brow and took a deep breath, and then set at the record again. “And all those nerds laboring away to learn Latin?” he spat. Two pigeons with white wingtips set down on the ledge to listen. “Are they doing it to lend moldy ancient dignity to such banalities as in vino veritas? Surely some of them are. Or to make people less fortunate than they are feel stupid? Yes, surely sometimes. That is indefensible. But are some of them, perhaps, simply doing it to improve themselves? Or because they’re interested? Yes, they must be. And do you know what some of them are doing, Sir Paul? Some of them are trying to learn about the world in order to get outside themselves—because however full you may be of vague benevolence, however happy and grateful you are, however compelled you feel to prattle about love, love, love, if you have no real conception of the world beyond yourself, then all your vague benevolence cannot end in anything but self worship. All your high aspirations and unimpeachable intentions can end in nothing but paeans to the wonder not of the world, not of humanity, not of all men, but of one man—you. If this takes the form of catchy, beautiful three-minute pop songs, then more power to you. But when you express this self-satisfaction and self-regard with an orchestra and a choir of eighty voices, for a full hour, then frankly, sir, the spectacle is nauseating.”

On this note, the pigeons took wing and flew away. The real shame of the whole thing is that “All You Need Is Love” is—or had been—one of Barnaby’s favorite songs.