As moments in this book reveal, Rochberg had always understood music as a “direct expression and uncompromised projection of the states of the human heart and soul.” He believed deeply in the personal Innerlichkeit of art, a romantic notion that “compositions were fragments of autobiography” that revealed the causal relationship between the “outer world of human actions and behavior and the inner world of mental-spiritual states.” It therefore comes as no surprise that his personal journals, in which he wrote regularly between 1948 and 2005, record strikingly candid reflections about how his lived experiences—whether consciously or subconsciously, positively or negatively— fed the spiritual content of his music. As he remarked in one entry from 1996, at age seventy-eight: “Dreaming is a little like writing music. You can't dream what you want to when you want. I keep thinking I’m on the road to the Falaise Gap, and I’ve walked it in memory. Stretches of it come back to me. It remains an unknown and is wrapped in pain and fear, inside and outside, all around. It has grown into a major, giant symbol within my life.”

In his journals, Rochberg detailed decades of residual trauma linked to his experiences during World War II. He describes a host of symptoms that correlate with the four diagnostic clusters recognized as clinical indicators of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD: re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood, and hyper-arousal. Among those he directly linked to his war experience were nightmares, flashbacks, a persistent sense of fatalism, debilitating bouts of depression, feelings of social isolation, and episodes of insomnia. Although PTSD is a fairly recent psychological designation—the American Psychiatric Association first established its diagnostic criteria in 1980—warrelated emotional trauma was already acknowledged in the colloquial military speak of the times: shell shock, effort syndrome, combat exhaustion, battle fatigue. As the army's chief neurologist Frederick Hanson belatedly determined, “Even the most normal of soldiers may be brought to neurotic decompensation by war,” and the emotional stress they suffered appeared “almost directly proportional to the time spent in combat.”