selfdivider

In Chapter 6 of In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin is in Bahia Blanca, located to the south-west of Buenos Aires, the last place before the Patagonian desert. He drives through the desert, sleepily watching

the rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the saltpans, and, on the horizon, land and sky dissolving into an absence of color.

He then notices the Indian shacks and briefly muses about the native Araucanian Indians, how they were so fierce that they flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead, how they scared the Spaniards out of their wits. “Their boys’ education,” Chatwin writes, “consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence and sexual athletics.” There is a mention of a book called Araucana written by a certain Alonso de Ercilla in honor of the Indians, which Voltaire purportedly read, using the Araucanian Indians as models for the Noble Savage.

After describing the desolate landscape of the Patagonian desert, Chatwin muses why Charles Darwin was so singularly attracted to the Patagonian desert -

In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these ‘arid wastes’ had taken such firm possession of his mind.

Perhaps to encapsulate his own speculation on the matter, Chatwin alludes to a book called Idle Days in Patagonia, written by W. H. Hudson in 1860, in which Hudson devotes a chapter to answering Darwin’s question. Hudson’s conclusion is that as one wanders through the Patagonian desert, “a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage)” becomes instilled in the wanderer, which is perhaps “the same as the Peace of God.”

It’s a fine thought by Hudson (or Chatwin), but one that I have my doubts about. There might be a reason for Darwin’s uncommon attachment to Patagonia that is far more restive and disturbing. In Chapter 5 of The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin writes about arriving in Bahia Blanca on September 7, 1832. After speculating that there must be no animals in the Patagonian desert, Darwin writes about digging into the ground and finding various lizards, insects and animals in a “half-torpid” state, and remembers a passage from Alexander von Humboldt’s writing which mentioned native Indians finding boas and crocodiles half-buried in the mud in their lethargic state, and how they sprinkled water on these creatures to animate them.

Then Darwin’s diary account takes a strange detour from his usual naturalist concerns. (I’m almost tempted to say “Sebaldian” in describing Darwin’s detour for more than one reason, but especially as Darwin’s digressive thoughts seem to have been prompted by Humboldt’s mention of the Indian practice of reanimating the buried animals: Alexander von Humboldt was one of Sebald’s favorite writers.) Darwin writes about the bloody battle waged by General Juan Manuel de Rosas’ troops against the native Indians. He writes with unqualified horror about the soldiers’ practice of murdering, in cold blood, all Indian women above 20 years of age. When he approaches a soldier to question him about this inhuman practice, the soldier replies: “Why What can be done They breed so!” There is also a mention of three Indian spies who are captured and summarily executed, after steadfastly refusing to give up information. The third Indian, Darwin notes, follows his perfunctory denial of “No se” with a statement, “Fire, I am a man, and can die!”

Although Darwin is stirred by these accounts, he is, after all, a dutiful Christian westerner (okay, please refrain from sending me philosophical emails about why Darwin is not a Christian. Because I don’t care. I’ll print the email out, and wipe my ass with it, thanks.) He believes that the Indian children who are captured and sold as slaves must be treated fairly by the captors, that there is little to complain of. But it is clear that the plight of this civilization of Indians is close to Darwin’s heart. He writes about an Indian escaping the pursuit of the troops, by riding on his horse by straddling only one leg on the animal’s body, hanging by the its neck to avoid the bullets. “Thus hanging on one side,” Darwin notes with wonderment, “he was seen patting the horse’s head, talking to him.”

It seems to me that Darwin felt very uneasy about this conquest of the Indians by Rosas’ troops, to say the least, and of the possible extinction of this “other” civilization & their way of life. Chapter 5 ends with a remarkable paragraph that is at once an archaeological observation and a quiet reflection on one civilization’s passing by the usurpation of another. There is no judgment in it, just the notice. As in the rest of The Voyage of the Beagle, the prose is restrained, each sentence tessellating beautifully upon the other with immaculate poise, forming the whole picture. On the surface, this moment described is only about the soldier using an Indian arrow as flint. But in Darwin’s notice, isn’t there a nostalgia for the demise of the civilization which he knows too little of, which will be forgotten too soon?

I saw one day a soldier striking fire with a piece of flint, which I immediately recognised as having been a part of the head of an arrow. He told me it was found near the island of Cholechel, and that they are frequently picked up there. It was between two and three inches long, and therefore twice as large as those now used in Tierra del Fuego: it was made of opaque cream-coloured flint, but the point and barbs had been intentionally broken off. It is well known that no Pampas Indians now use bows and arrows. I believe a small tribe in Banda Oriental must be excepted; but they are widely separated from the Pampas Indians, and border close on those tribes that inhabit the forest, and live on foot. It appears, therefore, that these arrow-heads are antiquarian relics of the Indians, before the great change in habits consequent on the introduction of the horse into South America.

Woke up at six in the morning and found a personal essay in yesterday’s NY Times called “The Gift” by Sam Lipsyte, about the author’s experience of taking care of his cancer-ridden mother as she was dying (Thanks for the link, Jenny). The essay is a gift for me, as a reader, in a different sense, since it’s so damn good. Moving, unsentimental, funny, and lucidly written. If you know Lipsyte’s fiction, this essay will further enlighten how you read through certain autobiographical streaks in his work, especially in Venus Drive. I interviewed Sam Lipsyte two years ago for The Blue Notebooks, and not knowing about his mother, asked him a pretty specific (and perhaps insensitive) question concerning his relationship to her. I forget what the actual question was. But I do remember that he did not skirt the issue, was frank and honest; it really was the highlight of that evening. I’ll shut up so you can go read “The Gift.” It’s perhaps my favorite Christmas essay, ever.

Once, lying on her bed, talking, talking about nothing in particular, I studied her as hard as I could. Her eyes were closed, and for the first time I could actually sense the end of her, her body. And lying there beside her was so sweet. Why did we wait until the end to let go of everything that ever kept us from just lying there and talking like two people who are going to die and not be able to talk anymore

(Image: by Georges Seurat, of his mother)

No, I am not drawing parallels between Stalin and Stockhausen. Just saying that I was thinking about both yesterday. I went to the bookstore to see if I might finally buy Montefiore’s Young Stalin, the book that was high on my “to read” list. I’m sure the book has its merits, but I’m sorry to say that I could not stomach its first page. This is how the book’s Prologue begins -

At 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing mustachioed cavalry captain in boots and jodhpurs…

You gotta be kidding me with those adjectives. We get “sultry” and “seething” in a quick succession, and the sentence is not even halfway done. I’m not so hot about “dashing mustachioed” either. And the writing in the first few pages is nauseatingly over-spiced with unfortunate adjectives and adverbs, shouting: INTRIGUE IS HERE! Very disappointed because I’m sure the narrative is as good as many of the reviewers have mentioned. Call me a fascist, but I don’t think I could get involved in the story past all that purple, purple, purple.

Later in the day, my friend M called me to see what I was up to, if I wanted to catch the Mayweather-Hatton fight tonight. Then he told me if I knew that Stockhausen died. I was caught off guard, not because I was stunned by his death, but rather because for some reason, I’d thought he died a long time ago. God, I thought to myself, he lived a full life.

So right now, I’m listening to the new recording of Stimmung, by Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices. Stockhausen composed the work after wandering through the ruins of Mexico, contemplating about the way that the Aztecs recited the magic names of gods through stimmung. The composition consists of 51 models organized around four eroto-spritual poems and the magic names of ancient gods (i.e. Aztec, ancient Greek). Six singers on six microphones (which are tuned to an inaudible harmonic of B-flat) progress through the models by singing in overtones. As you can see from the image, Stimmung is not a traditionally “written” work. The singers have a great amount of freedom, even in choosing the order in which the models and names should be sung; the order can be decided upon beforehand or improvised during the performance. I guess Cortazar’s Hopscotch may be a literary analogue, except that Stimmung allows for an even greater aleatory freedom and spontaneity. (For a fantastic explanation of Stimmung, go here.)

I’ve never been to a performance of Stimmung, but would love to, as it is very much a work which almost requires a live audience to convey its constantly morphing spiritual atmospheres. But Hillier’s luminous new recording is as close as you can get to a live experience, I guess. Stockhausen was once asked how he had arrived at the novel compositional technique of Stimmung, and his response is as beautiful and magical as anything you might ever read about creating a work of art -

After a few days, my work was only possible during the night. The children needed silence also during the day. So I began humming, did not sing loudly anymore, began to listen to my vibrating skull… Nothing oriental, nothing philosophical: just the two babies, a small house, silence, loneliness, night, snow, ice: pure miracle.

(The greatest Stockhausen photo, ever: by Betty Freeman)

It seems really cold this morning in NYC and my back is killing me because I slept on the couch for the week. Whenever I have a lot of work to do, I can’t put it upon myself to go into the bedroom and sleep like a decent human being. Anyways, my wife just brought me a cup of coffee and Glenn Gould is on the stereo, the French Suites. I think of how so many artists - from Mozart to Klimt and dozens in between - end up being skewered by Thomas Bernhard, but Glenn Gould is immortalized. “We exist,” Gould says in The Loser according to its narrator, “we don’t have any other choice.” Bernhard’s life and work in a nutshell, in other words.

Which makes me think of Edward Said on Glenn Gould. Although Edward Said’s interpretation of Glenn Gould’s pianism is too dependent on Adorno’s description of Bach’s polyphony (perhaps the weakest chapter in On Late Style), his ultimate assessment of Gould’s genius seems spot on to me -

The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world.

Gould’s disinterest in resolving the tension between aesthetic pleasure and worldly confusions finds its literary counterpoint in Cavafy. Said quotes from “The God Abandons Antony,” in which Cavafy orders Antony, before his attendant death, to hold still in absolute silence so that he can hear the exquisite music of Alexandria in its exact notes, for the final time -

go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Said claims that this refusal to resolve the tension between disenchantment and pleasure is the prerogative of late style in art: “[Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This seems entirely right to me, too. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente is perhaps the most despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend - Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -

If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.

One more application of late style: W. G. Sebald. It bothers me to the n-th degree when different scholars and critics peg his work as unremittingly pessimistic, without hope, even going so far as to proclaim that the trajectory of his work seemed to foretell his untimely death. Is it me or does their reading seem reductive and problematic to you, too They miss the tiny moments of gleam which Sebald pits against the portents of destruction - the rendering of the pleasure and the disenchantment. Without this notice, it seems to me, one is reading only 1/2 of Sebald. The narrator’s notice of a flitting butterfly and the myriad of quartz fragments glimmering in the Alps, before his dreaming of the Great Fire of London in Vertigo. The bodies of herrings which glow in phosphorence after their death (The Rings of Saturn). The impenetrable beauty of salt crystals that the narrator of The Emigrants notices in the salt-frames of Kissengen, after he comes out of the neglected Jewish cemetery that’s almost crumbling into the ground. What to make of these numerous, tiny moments of “beatific” pleasure and beauty, pitted against the scenes of destruction

The answer comes from Sebald himself, in an interview with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (you can listen to the podcast here, or read an excerpt from the interview in the forthcoming The Emergence of Memory). Silverblatt astutely notices that there is something in Sebald’s prose which brings “the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald agrees with Silverblatt’s assessment, and his reply in characterizing his project is not so distant from Said’s characterization of what late style is, how it renders both pleasure and disenchantment, without the artist’s attempt to resolve their contradiction -

I think Walter Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast.

I have no doubt that Walter Benjamin, in his previous incarnation, was a Japanese woman named Sei Shonagon, born in 966 AD, serving in the court of Empress Teishi. Whenever I read Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, I always think that Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project might have looked like it, if Benjamin had loosened up a bit, had enough self-assurance to have fun, let that burdensome Marxist ideology go to the dogs. Just as Benjamin’s ambition was to capture the bourgeois life of Paris in the 19th century, Shonagon, remarkably and succinctly, manages to capture the life - both ordinary and courtly - of Heian-kyo.

Even the way she organizes her “pillows” is, I guess, Benjaminian. (Albeit in a lighter, more lyrical manner.) There are mundane lists - of forests, plains, markets, ferry-crossings, bridges, trees that have no flowers… And there are still lists of a more personal kind, of breathtaking epigrammatic beauty and poetic brevity, through which Shonagon lets us see what she sees, feel what she felt. For example, under Things that make you feel nostalgic: “A dried sprig of aoi. Things children use in a doll play… On a rainy day when time hangs heavy, searching out an old letter that touched you deeply at the time you received it. Last year’s summer fan.” Or: Things that are far yet near -

Paradise.
The course of a boat.
Relations between men and women.

These lists are interspersed with more traditional accounts of her personal experience, lending a wonderfully granular reality to the personal reminiscence. And her voice - petulant, mischievous, nostalgic, funny… all at once - invades the modern reader’s head, as unmediated and vibrant as your neighbor’s or a friend’s. In my opinion, she out-Montaignes Montaigne, in that regard.

What is most moving, for me, is that the events which Shonagon tangentially and fleetingly mentions in her narrative correspond to the historical narrative of the downfall of Empress Teshi’s court; yet Shonagon keeps her gaze on the pleasures and delights of the life that surrounds her, only on life’s immediacy. So every time I open The Pillow Book, the effect is such that the present moment - then or now - seems more flourishing, more lasting than it is in reality:

Another scene of fascinating elegance - it’s very late at night, Her majesty has retired to her chamber, everyone is asleep and outside a lady is sitting talking with a senior courtier. From within comes the frequent sound of go stones dropping into the box. Delightful too to hear the soft sound of fire tongs being gently pushed into the ash of the brazier, and sense from this the presence of someone who isn’t yet asleep. A person who stays up late is always elegantly intriguing. You wake in the night to lie there listening through the partition, and realize from the sounds that someone is still up. You can’t hear what is said, but you catch the sound of a man’s soft laugh, and you long to know what they’re saying together.

One of my favorite chapters in The Rest Is Noise is the Benjamin Britten chapter. Perhaps because Alex Ross, who is also a keen reader of W. G. Sebald, points out the fact that the fishing town of Aldeburgh and the surrounding regions on the east coast of the British Isles, where Britten’s Peter Grimes is set and where Britten lived for most of his life, is also the very locale that haunts Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. The desolate melancholy of Aldeburgh’s landscape is the backdrop against which Peter Grimes, a fisherman, loses his mind; the same gray landscape of Suffolk’s sea coast also causes the narrator of The Rings of Saturn to lose all his bearings, slipping into a catatonic state of total immobility. When put to the task of explaining his opera, Britten said quite succinctly, “The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.” The tenor of Britten’s comment resonates in Sebald’s prose, as well, in all of his major works, as his primary occupation.

At the end of Act III, after Peter Grimes loses his mind and sails into the sea to kill himself, the chorus sings about the eternal revolutions of the sea: “In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide… it rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep.” Ross, in his typically lucid and understated prose, notes that this ocean of sound, “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor,” marks the fisherman’s grave.

In the third section of The Rings of Saturn, the Sebald-narrator is walking on a footpath that runs along the dunes and low cliffs, a few miles south of Lowestoft; a town, incidentally, where Britten was born. He spots a few tents along the beach, put up by some nomadic fishermen as if they have been fishing there and gazing out to the sea since time immemorial. Sebald notes that fishing no longer affords a living, as much of the fish population has been decimated by the pollution of the North Sea, whose waters bear tons of mercury, cadmium, and lead, not to mention fertilizer and pesticides. If not for fishing, then, why are they there

They say it is rare for any of the fisherman to establish contact with his neighbour, for, although they all look eastward and see both the dusk and the dawn coming up over the horizon, and although they are all moved, I imagine, by the same unfathomable feelings, each of them is nonetheless quite alone and dependent on no one but on himself and on the few items of equipment he has with him, such as a penknife, a thermos flask, or the little transistor radio that gives forth a scarcely audible, scratchy sound, as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other. I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

Alex Ross’s description of the ending of Peter Grimes, the ocean sound which marks the fisherman’s grave - “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor” - also seems like a perfect way to characterize Sebald’s passage quoted above, don’t you think And in an indulgent flight of fancy, nothing more, I can well imagine that each fisherman as described by Sebald - each lost to his neighbor, staring out to the emptiness and the ceaseless revolutions of the sea - might as well be a Peter Grimes or one of the ghosts of the dead who haunt the fisherman into his final dementia and suicide. Peter Grimes, before he sails off to sea to sink in his own boat, asks, “What harbor shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?” No man can answer that question, of course, and Peter Grimes sails off into the terrible ocean, the same bleak body of water that the fishermen in The Rings of Saturn fix their eyes and thoughts on.

(Last image, by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Thanks a lot for coming out to The Blue Notebooks interview with Alex Ross last night. Alex is somewhere in the photo on the left, talking and autographing; sorry about the “Where’s Waldo” effect but I couldn’t really find a picture from last night that I could use. I was quite nervous in talking to him, as I’ve been his avid reader for many years now. And it was difficult trying to find a way into the discussion, as The Rest Is Noise attempts to recount nothing less than the cultural and political history of the twentieth century by a musical path. I tried to find a way in by exploring Alex’s book through asking him about recurring themes in his book: 1. the consequence of the historical practice in aestheticizing politics, and politicizing music (Hitler, Stalin, R. Strauss, Shostakovich), 2. “anti-modern modernism” vs. avant-garde (Britten & Sibelius vs the Second Viennese School, for example), 3. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as an organizing trope of the book 4. The Book of Daniels and the “apocalypse” (Klaus Mann & the Weimar Republic, Stockhausen, Messiaen), and 5. Cross-pollination of influences and the eventual miscegenation of music, what it means today.

Needless to say, Alex’s answers were illuminating (rather than relying on my faulty memory to recollect his responses, I’d say you’re better off reading The Rest Is Noise yourself to find out.) The highlight of the event was when Alex played audio clips of the music in discussion. There was Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as people were walking in, and Alex played some Messiaen and Cage, and combed through his iTunes library (in vain!) for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to compare with the Sibelius Fifth. It didn’t matter that Coltrane wasn’t played, because Alex sang the beginning of Bernstein’s “New York, New York” to demonstrate that the intervals of Bernstein’s song are also the same intervals from the beginning of the Sibelius 5, too, and that Bernstein, most likely, was appropriating Sibelius’s set of intervals with a knowing wink (UPDATE: see Alex’s update of this, here). We closed with a discussion of Britten’s artistry, his version of “modernity,” and I talked to him about the devastating performance of Jon Vickers in Peter Grimes that can be seen on YouTube, which Alex linked before on his blog. There was just no other way to discuss Grimes’s devolution into dementia, the scene in which the off-stage chorus chants “Grimes… Grimes…” seventy-three times, except by listening to it; so Alex played the excerpt when Grimes is reduced to singing his own name, his sanity and sense of self all but completely broken down. And I’m sure it scared the shit out of everybody. The audience favorite, though, was clearly the Sibelius Fourth, as many people asked me after the event what the piece was; Alex commented over the music, sensitively demonstrating Sibelius’s genius in manipulating our sense of time, how the music sounds like it’s slowing down, yet it’s not - just the notational value of each note lengthening.

Afterwards, Alex and some of us walked to Radio Perfecto to have some really greasy quesadillas and burgers and alcohol, for further conversation. About Radiohead. The Lenny Kravitz (no, not the dreadlocks + sunglasses guy but the long-defunct band). He was as open-hearted and sincere in person as he is in prose. I asked him if he might like to participate in a possible panel I’m planning on Edward Said’s On Late Style, and he seemed interested. So stay tuned.

Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain is a book I periodically read in spurts, from time to time. I can’t read the whole brutal thing through, though; it just wears me down emotionally. In my opinion, The Body In Pain is an invaluable work which delineates the necessity of literature in the socio-ethical context, how the worlds “unmade” by political regimes of torture are “made” again by the creation of words and literary artifacts. It is clear that W. G. Sebald read this book very carefully, cherished it: not only does he reference The Body In Pain explicitly in one of his essays in On the Natural History of Destruction, his disquisition on the nature of pain parallels many of Scarry’s assertions. Anyhow, when I read recent novels by Junot Diaz and Nathan Englander about the violent juntas and torture regimes in South America, I thought about The Body In Pain as I contemplated how each writer dealt with the historical atrocity of the past through their writing. About the aesthetic and moral necessity of their “work” -

That pain and the imagination are each other’s missing intentional counterpart, and that they together provide a framing identity of man-as-creator within which all other intimate perceptual, psychological, emotional, and somatic events occur, is perhaps most succinctly suggested by the fact that there is one piece of language used - in many different languages - at once as a near synonym for pain, and as a near synonym for created object; and that is the word “work.”

And of course, I’m also thinking about the “work” of so many writers, too: Roberto Bolano, Max Sebald, Peter Weiss, Jean Genet, Primo Levi, Isaac Babel, Jean Améry…

I’ll be conducting an interview with The New Yorker’s classical music critic, Alex Ross, to talk about his just-released history of 20th century music, The Rest Is Noise. The event will be next Monday, 10/29, at 8 pm. 501 Schermerhorn inside Columbia University on 116th and Broadway. If you are in NYC, please come. If you were too cheap to pony up the money for Alex’s event at The New Yorker festival (like me!), you should come, as the event is free and open to public. And please say hi and hang out with us after the event, as we’ll most likely be having a few drinks. (We’ll have a few copies of Alex’s book on hand for sale; you can help The Blue Notebooks, the interview series I started, by purchasing these books, so buy, buy, buy!)

The book is, by all measures, an impressive achievement. The anecdotal history that Alex relates in talking about music is consistently vibrant; my favorite is one of Arnold Schoenberg running into Marta Feuchtwanger at a supermarket in Los Angeles, yelling that he never had syphilis. Schoenberg was responding to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the protagonist of which (Adrian Leverkühn) was inspired by Schoenberg, via Adorno who had advised Mann in the writing of the novel.

Of course the writing in The Rest Is Noise about the music itself is incandescent; Alex Ross’s musical description is always illuminating and poetic. But if you are a reader of his reviews and articles at The New Yorker, that should come as no surprise. But my favorite aspect of the book is the dexterity with which Alex can juxtapose the cultural and intellectual history with the musical moment, grafting the import of the era onto the musical meaning. The limits of language which was addressed by Wittgenstein in Tractatus and by Hermann Broch in Death of Virgil is invoked in the discussion of Webern’s music. Verlaine and Turner in Debussy. Alex Ross achieves this kind of palimpsestic writing with remarkable compression and understatement; The Rest Is Noise may be the only 600-pp book of musical history which can be commended for its brevity - it reads fast. Here’s an example of the author’s inspired concision: in discussing the music of Richard Strauss, who strongly felt compelled to mine the quotidian, boring details of ordinary life for his musical subject, Alex Ross writes -

Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, observed that music could find as much pathos in the disagreements of an ordinary household as in the agonies of the house of Agamemnon. There in one sentence was Strauss’s career from Domestica to Elektra.

Brilliant.

Six years ago, a guy named JW died in an apartment near Columbia University. He was a grad student, I forget which department. He had just taken the LSAT earlier in the afternoon, and with a friend, started to drink into the night. According to the investigation conducted after their deaths, a cigarette started a small fire in the room, but they were deep in their sleep, unable to awake until the room was in conflagration; the smoke detector in the apartment had run out of batteries, and it was deduced that they died from asphyxiation. He was a few years younger than me, so when he was a freshman in college, I forced a few drinks too many on him, on too many nights. A typical way to bond when you are young, stupid and male. One night, I punched him out and bashed the window of his car - I forget the reason why, now - and to apologize, took him out to a different bar and made him drink more.

My friends C, D, J and I drove up together for his funeral. We stayed at this girl’s house in Fort Lee, where the air was ashy from the detritus from the 9/11; across the Hudson, the black smoke enshrouding the Lower Manhattan looked like it had been there since primordial times. The funeral was held at a dank, Chinese funeral home in Flushing. JW’s parents, who had flown in a few days earlier from Korea, looked stunned beyond grief. JW’s sister, who was very pretty and whom none of us had seen before, cried throughout. At the end of the funeral, JW’s father got up to give a brief speech, to thank the funeral guests. He was remarkably composed, until, looking at me and my friends, he told us in between choking sobs, that we are his sons, too, but he was sorry that he would never hear JW call him father again.

Driving back down to Baltimore, my friends and I were pensive, but not pensive enough to stop by Atlantic City to drink and play poker. On the road back to Baltimore, my friend C drove and I was in the front passenger seat, passing a spliff back and forth, while D and J were snoring in the back. We talked about JW a great deal, and how all of us were brought closer together by his death, how we will remember. Today, I don’t stay in touch with any of them, and I forgot about JW until last night, when JW appeared in my dream.

In the dream, JW was with his girlfriend and I was the third wheel. We went to the Cheesecake Factory at the Inner Harbor. He was older than he was at the time of his death. Over bland pasta, we talked about trivial things, like cheating on the organic chemistry mid-term, and girls we had both liked. He kept calling me “hyung” (which means older brother in Korean) and I told him to stop doing that. I don’t remember the dream after that, except that I ended up swimming to Fells Point from the Inner Harbor and the water smelled really fishy.

At the end of Hydriotaphia, after contemplating diverse methods with which men bury their own, Sir Thomas Browne writes that “‘Tis all one to lye in St. Innocents Church-yard, as in the Sands of Egypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.” Of course, not many of us living in this age possess the faith of Thomas Browne; hence, the phrase “extasie of being ever” registers to us not as a promise, but as an ache that will not resolve itself. What we are left with from the Browne passage, then - at least in my opinion - is only the equalizing blight of death itself, without the consolation of eternity.

So it was with these thoughts that I started to browse through The Lives of a Cell earlier today, an essay collection by Lewis Thomas. Thomas was a doctor, a dean at NYU’s Bellevue Medical Center, as well as a science writer who wrote with the language of a poet from a forgotten era. He wrote about guinea pigs being trained to smell nitrobenzene and about Mahler’s Ninth or a Bartok quartet, with equal eloquence. In reading him again, I became more convinced that Lewis Thomas, who died in 1993, must have been the reincarnation of Sir Thomas Browne, who was also a doctor who wrote in uncannily beautiful prose.

I re-read Lewis Thomas’s essay called “The Long Habit,” which is about clinical death and mortality. The essay’s title is taken from Thomas Browne’s quote from Hydriotaphia: “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.” The essay takes a strange turn with an anecdote of David Livingston, who barely survived after being crushed by a lion’s jaws. Livingston was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of calm and total painlessness which attended his near-death experience, that he believed that a certain protective physiologic mechanism kicked in at the verge of death. Instead of debunking the myth, Thomas gives clinical examples of patients who do not feel pain at the threshold of death, but a remarkable sense of detachment, equanimity and quietude.

Fine, Lewis Thomas says, perhaps it should be no surprise to us that after millennia of evolution, the biological provision for death would be as abundant with genetic information for guidance through the death’s stages as it would be for living. But what about the permanent vanishing of consciousness Thomas approaches the question with a touching simplicity: “Are we to be stuck forever with this problem Where on earth does it go? Is it simply stopped dead in its tracks, lost in humus, wasted?” Then, Lewis Thomas, a twentieth-century man of hard science and medicine, arrives at a whimsical proposition that is at least as beguilingly hopeful and gracious as what Thomas Browne offered us centuries earlier, about the “extasie of being ever” -

I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter.

(In JW’s memory.)

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