gauge admirably the pianist was thinking of traversing fields and woods, gauging away, driving towards the cultural castle, he was not going to the private view for private viewing but intending to see the show without ulterior motive, had heard about the exhibition long before receiving the invitation, had received the invitation but long before receiving it already decided to visit the Brandenburgian castle of Neuhardenberg, was regardless of the invitation au fait with the music of the Third Reich, had practically no expectations of the private view, expected neither primary nor secondary benefits, had never expected more of private views than that he would not linger over them but he did have expectations of the exhibition; from the private view of course he would gain nothing more than the grease of hands shaken and presentations on autopilot but from the exhibition something, an affirmation, why not even a discovery, had indeed discovered Schoenberg’s Blue Self-Portrait, seen the majority of Schoenberg’s paintings, got to know the musician and also the painter. Most composers know nothing of Schoenberg’s approach to painting nor do most painters know much about his style of composition. The pianist had seen most of the self-portraits, yet had never before seen the Blue Self-Portrait, so stopped before that blue, felt the anxiety and chill, the awareness of time and negative space folding into itself, sought some affirmation that he knew would be pointless, bent over the case that held Schoenberg’s letter. He had peered at the letter and read it three or four times from the bottom up, starting with the signature which he knew and recognized, it was a humdrum letter to the Reich’s culture minister, Schoenberg pleading with the culture minister to recognize his music’s value to the nation, imploring one last time but too late, had in reality already said fuck off to the Nazis, fuck off face-to-face, Scheisse! Schoenberg’s face versus the Nazis’ face—that Schoenberg had balls, the pianist reflected as indeed he did every time he thought about Schoenberg, thought to himself while standing there facing the Blue Self-Portrait, to have balls or not to have them, the blue’s affront to the radiant sky and its chortling countryside, Scheisse to the Nazis long before they were marching through Munich. Look at that look, thought the pianist, anti-Nazi the look and anti-Nazi the portrait’s blue, Schoenberg’s expression promised nothing positive for the art of the future, conveyed an anxiety for the future, looked far beyond any definition of the work of art or of the future; the pianist weighed Schoenberg’s solitude and Schoenberg’s solitary conscience flaunted in advance: an insult to the national-socialist ethic, and it was with the pure, burning joy of having deepened his conscience, as pianist both composer and musician, thanks to this proof of Schoenberg’s courage as a painter displayed in the Neuhardenberg castle, that the pianist got in his car and drove back to Berlin, his heart punching his ribs, that he found, perhaps precisely in his own little car, puttering along the zoned-out roads of the Brandenburg countryside, a sparkling new, completely original and perfectly formed line of music, shaping there at the wheel and in anticipation the perfection of man in his time and man in the idea. The idea is indeed beautiful but it’s nothing without time and time is nothing without the idea; as a musician he had a sense of time as tempo, driving around in the pre-Polish countryside, the sense of this musical idea in time, dazzled by his insight, perceived the limits of his idea outside time, had to stop the car in order to get his brand-new melody down on paper, sitting in his car pulled over on the hard shoulder, right there he wrote down the melody. Thinking back to the pianist’s car made me feel sick, my knees went weak and my head was burning, I could have passed it off as airsickness but really it was shame, plain and simple, and by association of shames I recalled driving the pianist-composer-driver right round the bend by making him go up and down Neue Kanstrasse three times because I could no longer find the entrance to my Polish hostel, and my shameometer measured a new record with that devastating memory, my soles were damp, my temples throbbing and my eyes squeezed shut in aged penitent-nun style—which comes straight from my education—remembering the pianist’s exasperation after the third of our three back-and-forths, his deep sigh, his ever more visible and ever less restrained impatience for us to be done, um Gottes Willen, by the grace of God Schluss! Will this never end! I heard him, the irritation in his gritted teeth, I burned with shame as I pictured once more the pianist’s hands clamped rigid on the wheel, the pianist’s exasperation you had to see his clenched jaw, the pianist was wondering given apparent circumstances and who could blame him when this interminable evening would be over and at what hour he might finally go home to bed not to dream but to sleep that peaceful, silent, restorative sleep without visions that would allow him to hope for a new day just like all the other new days required for the equilibrium of a pianist-composer, a new day shaped by the essential practice that the pianist relied on to play the piano and the composer to compose.
I dived into my book with ridiculous zeal, I gulped down a dozen of Thomas Mann’s letters to Theodor W Adorno and a dozen of Theodor W Adorno’s to Thomas Mann, thinking it’s never too late to learn and staking everything on general knowledge and on literature in particular as if I could understand anything of the very lofty adumbrations of the one and of the equally lofty cogitations of the other, the other being just as singular as the one and the one as particular as the other, as if, through this correspondence about returning and in the language of Goethe which was
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