“This is an essay about what happens when knowledge is warped by a cult of interpretive genius. It is about having had my understanding of music fundamentally structured by James Levine’s craft when I was the same age as the children he allegedly liked to abuse, and in the process having decided not to know what I knew. It is about what it means to me that my love of music and my understanding of how it should sound were shaped by someone who abused children, and that the institutions in which and by which that love was fostered likely protected the abuser and enabled the abuse.”