Jorgy’s Shorts has recently come out. It pairs everyday situations with classical music and a bit of philosophical nuance, and since the stories run from funny to absurd, you will probably laugh.
The book has 16 short stories. Each one comes with a piece of classical music and a philosopher’s perspective. It is fiction that makes you think.
| Story | Composer | Composition | Philosopher |
| Dark Brown Coffee | Schubert | Trout-quintet | Aristotle |
| Dancing Queen | Astor Piazzolla | Libertango | Simone de Beauvoir |
| Swimming Rivalry | Saint-Saëns | Le Carnaval des animaux | Michel de Montaigne |
| The Dentist’s Chair | Mozart | Così fan tutte | David Hume |
| A Clown’s Jump | Stravinsky | Petrushka | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Dining Out | Mendelssohn | Concerto for Violin and Piano | Epicurus |
| Raising the Bar | Ravel | La Valse | Baruch Spinoza |
| These Useful Hours | Philip Glass | The Hours | Seneca |
| An Escalating Audition | Bach | Goldberg Variations | Epictetus |
| The Observation Post | Mussorgsky | Pictures at an Exhibition | Henri Bergson |
| At the Movies | Shostakovich | Symphony No. 9 | Hannah Arendt |
| When the Doorbell Rings | Bartók | Bluebeard’s Castle | Immanuel Kant |
| The Neighbor’s Tiles | Haydn | Symphony No. 94 | Socrates |
| A Cough and a Call | Janáček | String Quartet No. 1 | Arthur Schopenhauer |
| Girls Wanna Have Fun | Prokofiev | The Love for Three Oranges | Albert Camus |
| Water for the Tree | Erik Satie | Gymnopédie No. 1 | Ludwig Wittgenstein |
A taste of The Neighbor’s Tiles
Jorgy’s neighbor comes over for coffee, but soon they’re sharing a glass of good wine. After a few refills, the neighbor relaxes and starts telling the story of his recent vacation mishap, only a little embarrassed, probably thanks to the wine. He always goes to the same place. Years ago, he set up his mobile home in the Ardennes and is still grateful for it.
Twenty-four centuries at one table: the range behind Jorgy’s Shorts
Put all sixteen stories of Jorgy’s Shorts next to each other and a long span of time shows up. The pages cover only a handful of ordinary weeks in one person’s life, but the composers and philosophers who keep them company come from many centuries.
Two and a half centuries of music
The music in Jorgy’s Shorts runs from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, written around 1741, to Philip Glass’s score for The Hours, from 2002. That is about 260 years, and it covers a good part of the history of Western classical music. Haydn and Mozart bring the poise of the late 18th century, Schubert and Mendelssohn the Romantic ache of the 19th. Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, Shostakovich, Janáček, and Prokofiev bring the 20th century’s irony, fracture, and reinvention, and Satie and Glass add minimalist stillness.
Each piece was chosen because it fit a story. Stravinsky’s Petrushka really does sound like a fairground puppet whose dignity collapses in public, and Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony behaves like a polite chord landing exactly where a locked garden gate would. Choosing music story by story still ended up sampling about 260 years of composition, almost by accident. Maybe that shows the feelings behind these stories (embarrassment, tenderness, quiet defiance, the ache of a farewell) have not changed much since Bach’s time, even if the music that describes them has.
Twenty-four centuries of philosophy
The philosophy spans even more time, and it is stranger to hold in your head all at once. The first story is paired with Aristotle, who wrote in Athens in the 4th century BC, and the last with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in Cambridge in the 20th century AD. That is a gap of roughly 2,300 years. Socrates, who has a story of his own, is older than Aristotle, so counting him the span grows to about 2,400 years.
Between them, the sixteen stories cover many of the major currents in Western philosophy. Aristotle and Socrates bring classical ethics. Epicurus, Seneca, and Epictetus come from the Hellenistic schools, and they cared more about how to live than about building abstract systems. Hume, Kant, and Spinoza stand for Enlightenment rigor. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the 19th century’s great unsettlers, each argue in their own way that reason runs the show less than we would like to think. Then comes a cluster of 20th-century voices, Bergson, Arendt, Camus, Beauvoir, and Wittgenstein, who wrote in the shadow of two world wars and tried to work out what freedom, judgment, or meaning could still look like afterward.
Each thinker reads the same kind of small, ordinary moment differently. Aristotle sees a garden dispute as a question of timing and self-restraint. For Beauvoir, a dance floor is about who is willing to risk being seen. Under Socrates’s questioning, a stolen pile of tiles becomes a small test of what someone actually believes about justice, once his excuses are taken away one at a time. The readings sit side by side without canceling each other out, which is what happens when twenty-four centuries of serious thinking get pointed, one at a time, at the same unassuming man going about his week.
Why the range matters
The questions these stories ask are not new: how to handle an insult, when to intervene, what is owed to a stranger, how to live with disappointment. People have been turning them over for as long as anyone has written things down, in every century on this list, with whatever music happened to be new at the time.
If you read each story with its music and its philosopher, you may notice that continuity. You may also feel a little less alone in whatever ordinary, unresolved moment made you look for the book in the first place.
