I made a trip to DC a couple of weeks ago. A co-worker told me she was going to go with some business colleagues to Wolf Trap for a concert. Since I am known by a few folks in the company as one of those “music types,” she asked if I wanted to join them to hear “some soprano.”

I’m a bit snooty about these things, so I said I’d get back to her.

Later, I went and checked the web site. My first attempt to inspect the program informed me that Jethro Tull was performing that night (Aqualung anyone?). I almost made my excuse right then, but upon reflection considered that I must have entered the wrong date. Once I plugged in the right date, that “some soprano” mentioned by my colleague turned out to be Kiri Te Kanawa, or “Dame Kiri,” as we “music types” like to say.

Most of us would likely know Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice from her recording of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” which was used in the opening of the Merchant Ivory film A Room with a View.

I first took notice of her through a recording of Chants d’Auvergne, a collection of folk song settings by Joseph Canteloube. A composer and musicologist with a life long passion for French folk song, Canteloube arranged and provisioned these lusty songs with lush, over-the-top orchestrations. When channeled through Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice, these songs became something of a guilty pleasure for me in my late teens.

So after finding the right date on the web site, I surveyed the program. It was mostly “light classical,” but hey, it’s July at Wolf Trap. You can hardly expect a tired lobbyist or think-tank pundit to sit on the lawn at the end of a busy day, sip chardonnay, and listen to Schoenberg’s Erwartung. And on the program were some of the Canteloube songs.

I e-mailed back: “I’m in.”

So I was all set for my guilty pleasure. The evening came and we arrived at our seats. Te Kanawa came out to much hoopla after a brief overture, and began with some songs by Richard Strauss. Then she sang some selections from the Chants d’Auvergne.

As I listened to the performance, a strange sensation came over me. All at once it seemed that an immense accumulation of experiences were present before me in that moment, from shepherds, centuries ago, high in the French Pyrenees singing their native Occitan songs to a composer who a century ago fashioned these tunes into a new work to a soprano from New Zealand who learned a relatively obscure French dialect to perform these songs—all freighted within the performance before me on the stage.

This accumulation of meaning and memory is part of how we enjoy a work of art to be sure, but at this moment all came upon me in a palpable flash.

This set me to wondering. Does God, who knows (one would presume) the sum total of existence, experience each event of his creation in the same way? Is he able to taste each moment as an intense rush of the present combined with unfailing memory and perfect foreknowledge?

That would be something.