The country had strayed into musics beyond my ability to make out. I could only take them in contained doses. Now and then, during the three-day marathon of my belated education, I backslid and trolled for my own old addictions. The flood of now—the music that people really used and needed—had risen so high that only a few scattered islands of bypassed memory remained above water. When I managed to find classical stations at all, they beamed out a continuous stream of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Soon there would be only a dozen pieces left from the last thousand
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