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Realizing that the story is not completely “true” may lessen its interest for some readers. But while fiction makes it possible to refrain from revealing some secrets, it is the only way to reveal others.
Brilliance and desolation appear intermittently in the record of their lives. Joy and sadness play tug-of-war. This is all the more reason why the alignment of their souls possesses a quality that is rare in today’s world—a quality that I shall call, if I may, beauty.
“Music is born in opposition to the beauty of silence; the creation of music lies in the attempt to use sound to bring about new beauty that contrasts with the beauty of silence.”
These days, musicians of every sort, and audiences too, were denied the experience of this rich silence. At any rate, there wasn’t enough time to simply lose oneself in it.
In exchange for the privilege of life, individuals in the modern world put up with ceaseless clamor. Not only noises but images, smells, tastes, perhaps even the warmth of others . . . all of it rushing at them in a mad free-for-all, each bit screaming its presence.
But the life he was now seeking to refine, amid the clamor of the everyday world, was gasping for breath.
Musical depth and breadth. Richness that rewarded repeated hearings and a sudden radiance that captivated listeners the very first time. Relief from humankind’s most pressing psychological afflictions and a friendly invitation to capriciousness. Spiritual liberation and day-to-day solace.
“After a certain age, when a man goes to bed with a woman who has no intellect, he feels rotten the morning after.”
If she could just become one with his music, freed from all else. She longed to melt into the flowing beauty where time and melody combined in perfect measure.
As they grew older, people distanced themselves from love not so much from a diminishing of passion, the desire to love, as from a dulling of the clear and anguished self-awareness of adolescence, the fear that they were not lovable.
“Your existence has punched a hole in my life. Or rather, it’s embedded deep within me.”
Loneliness, when it came down to it, was the awareness of your utter lack of influence in the world—knowing that you could and would have zero influence on either your contemporaries or on future generations.
Human beings live by exposing their lives relentlessly and comically to the eyes of others.”
She began to feel as if she had stumbled on a new definition of “wantonness.” To be wanton meant not merely to be extravagant but somehow to lose track of one’s fundamental being in the joy of complete abandonment to the other—a joy that knew no bounds.
He realized that for the world to overflow with meaning, it couldn’t exist only for oneself.
She felt as if she were wandering in a maze with any number of exits. Compared to a maze where every wrong path led to a dead end and forced you to retrace your steps, a maze with no dead ends and only different exits was far crueler.
A coincidence could not in itself be either good or evil. And yet, if somewhere along the line any little thing had been different, the configuration of the world today might not be the same;
Unreasonable as it might seem, experiencing the happiness that the dead and others would never know made survivors feel guilty.
Knowing that the past was fragile and liable to change at a moment’s notice, he strove not to alter it, to leave things as they were.
Though she had been with him only three times, he was the love of her life. The music soared on. Oh, that this moment might last forever, might never end.
