Composers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel.
And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician.
Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows;
it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from
the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for
yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he
has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His
thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and
the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails
to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love;
he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in
the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things,
understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being
deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.
Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said
was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made
eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress,
the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now
the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and
enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once
been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present
by the brightness of visions.
He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side
of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black
frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a
needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could
see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed,
or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden
become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning,
always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening
along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he
remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the
myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirring _presto_ in
the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he sketched on awakening
from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect
repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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