There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty

Boris Vian once wrote with reckless clarity: “There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.” Though spoken in the playful voice of a poet and jazzman, these words strike like an ancient hymn to joy. For beneath the humor lies a truth that has echoed across ages: that life’s essence is found not in the accumulation of burdens and trivialities, but in the radiant forces that lift the human spirit—love and music.

The ancients too sought to distill life into its purest elements. The Greeks honored Eros, the power of love that binds the world together, and they honored the Muses, the patrons of art and music, who stirred the soul to transcendence. What Vian declared in modern Paris was but a new phrasing of an old wisdom: that in the end, life is not made of the noise of power, possessions, or ambition, but of the sweet fire of connection and the rhythms that awaken the soul.

Consider the story of Duke Ellington, named by Vian himself. Ellington, rising from Washington D.C. to the world’s stages, did not merely write music; he wrote landscapes of emotion, entire worlds of rhythm and harmony. His orchestra carried the pulse of Black America, the blues, the swing, the joy and sorrow of a people transmuted into eternal sound. Those who heard him were lifted beyond the ordinary. In Ellington’s compositions, the world’s ugliness was forgotten, replaced by the beauty of horns and drums that spoke directly to the heart.

And consider New Orleans, cradle of jazz. From its streets came music born of struggle and freedom, of exile and celebration. There, enslaved peoples once drummed their memories into Congo Square, and out of that rhythm grew the seed of jazz, a language universal. To Vian, who adored jazz above all, this music was life itself: rebellious, sensual, triumphant, and unbreakable. In its sound was both love and liberation, a beauty greater than all the false values of a conformist world.

The meaning of Vian’s words is clear: strip life to its essentials. Cast off the illusions of status, the endless pursuit of wealth, the empty rituals of appearances. What remains is what has always mattered—human connection and the art that keeps us alive. Without love, life withers into loneliness; without music, life descends into silence. Everything else, he calls ugly, for it distracts the soul from its true nourishment.

The lesson for us is profound. Each of us must ask: what do I place at the center of my life? Do I chase the hollow, or do I cling to the eternal? The answer is given by Vian’s bold voice: choose love in all its forms—romantic, familial, fraternal, universal. Choose music, whether in jazz, in song, or in the rhythm of your own beating heart. These are the treasures no hand can steal, the sources of joy that neither time nor death can erase.

Therefore, let each soul practice the art of simplification. Love deeply and without shame. Cherish those who bring warmth to your days. Seek out music that stirs you, that awakens you, that reminds you of your own humanity. And when life grows heavy with the false, return to these two things. For in them lies a truth older than kings and empires: that beauty, once found, makes all else pale into nothingness.

Thus Boris Vian’s words endure, half jest, half revelation: there are only two things—love and music. And he was right. For when all else fades, when the world’s ugliness consumes itself, it will be love that remains in memory and music that echoes through eternity.