Terrorism sickens and compels, so that when you go to a concert at Washington’s Kennedy Center days after a massacre at a Paris concert hall, you cannot help but think about an attack.

You know it’s unlikely, but after Paris the unthinkable is in the air. Mass death has become a remote possibility for everyone who lives in big cities, and a somewhat less remote possibility for the people who live in and around DC.

The conductor of the Washington Chorus, in its Sunday performance of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Sea Symphony, thanked us, in his opening remarks, for our bravery in coming out. Julian Wachner brought forward, when he did that, the latent thoughts we’d all taken with us into the theater, and though I don’t think any of us agreed that we were brave, we appreciated the realism of the statement, the way it acknowledged what was going on in our heads.

Mr UD and I had checked out the security at the entrance, and I expressed surprise that our bags weren’t examined. I sort of wanted that to happen. Instead, a few uniformed guards met our eyes and welcomed us as we walked in. I thought of all the cameras that had to be trained on us as we moved in a big crowd (no one seemed to have decided to stay home) toward the Concert Hall. Beyond the windows overlooking the Kennedy Center’s deck, late afternoon sunlight rested above the skyline. The look and the mood was calm, autumnal, and I felt the contrast between this happy orderly setting and the madness of a threatening world.

I’d bought close-in box seats because La Kid sings in the chorus and we wanted a good look at her. “Our exit is right outside the door,” my husband said, noting that we were only steps from a “Chorister’s Entrance.” We glanced at the people around us, vaguely appraising them, which seemed both absurd (they looked exactly like us) and irresistible. I made various silly remarks about whether I’d survive leaping to the orchestra seats, and how here in the first level boxes we had the advantage of a full view of the hall. I thought of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, in which Chechens kept terrified people in their seats for two days until Russian forces killed the terrorists (and many theater-goers) by pumping in poison gas.

The first piece was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece I’ve heard in various venues all my life and which I’ve long found almost unbearably emotional. In his introductory remarks, Wachner talked about the “colors” of Victorian music, and for me at least, in this piece, these are the colors of gray curtains obscuring the once-green landscapes of youth.

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Not that I feel anything like this poignant nostalgia about my own youth. But the music is so powerfully insinuating (and my memory of the great and tragic Jacqueline Du Pre, who became famous for her performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, is evoked when I hear anything by him) that it makes me enter that attitude whether I own it or not.

That same power of music – a power intensified by human voices – took possession of me much more happily in the Vaughn Williams piece, whose words are drawn from Walt Whitman’s spirited, ever-youthful, and optimistic poetry. Behold, the sea itself, the massed voices thundered at the start, and, in the waves of sounds they went on to make, one felt the power and mystery not merely of the sea but of the earth altogether.

The words and music made us all out to be heroic mariners navigating perilous waters in a ship whose flag is

A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death…

This was great art doing what great art does: Grounding us in the enigmatic realities of mortal life and at the same time transcending them, taking us somewhere “elate” above them. After all the sea-going, “Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name, / The true son of God shall come singing his songs.”

Poets remind us that we have a brave and mystery-sailing spirit within us; they give that spirit words and music.

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At the end of the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece, the poet rejects grand abstractions:

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death…

But he is ecstatic at the thought of his “actual me.”

But that I, turning, call to thee, O Soul, that actual me
And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastness of Space.