The Deceptive Cadence as a Metaphor for Life : Listening with Care through a Crisis Situation

A meditation on gratitude, strangeness, and listening with careA deceptive cadence suggests resolution but withholds it, opening instead to uncertainty, fragility, and the unexpected. This philosophical-existential inquiry takes that musical figure as a metaphor for life itself—disrupted by illness, sustained by another’s gift, and reshaped by the presence of death. Music here becomes a vital companion: pianist Brad Mehldau’s “Remembering before all this” evokes the presence of detachment during the pandemic; Gustav Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” reflects on the humanities’ distance from the world; his “Ninth Symphony” invites listening with care, asking whose ears we lend when we listen; and Avishai Cohen’s setting of Zelda Mishkovsky’s poem “Departure” confronts the silence of death. These works help us think, feel, and listen through fragility. Moving between narrative and reflection, this book explores transplantation in the form of intrusion, life as a deceptive cadence, and how survival unsettle boundaries between the self and the other, body and identity, humanities and medicine. Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Intruder, it argues that boundaries—often seen as obstacles—can sustain survival and meaning. At heart, it is a meditation on gratitude, strangeness, and listening with care, raising urgent questions about human values within the humanities. Mats Arvidson is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. His research explores the sense-making processes that emerge in the encounter between human beings and medialities of different kinds. This book is an expression of that exploration where the body is at the center of this mediality.