[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He did not enjoy it, and often the stuff had no meaning for him, but it took his time nonetheless.It had taken half his life.In his voicetyper was an unfinished essay on Buxtehude; he had abandoned it last night when the fugues and inventions piled up in a baroque tangle and he could make no more sense of them.Notes had swarmed past his eyes like flies on a five-staved racetrack, the precise ordered counterpoint a frightening miniature of his own boxed and formal life.He fell asleep with that image and woke to the sudden shock of being thirty-five.And he thought of Ludwig Van Beethoven, his avatar, the one constant source of solace in his life.He wanted to be Beethoven that morning, more than he ever had before.Such a thing was not impossible.It was not easy to be Beethoven, of course.Like most of the Lincoln Center musicologists in the year 2016, he had been trying the greater part of his career for that distinction; and only now, after years of the lesser talents, the Couperins and Loeschorns and Bertinis, and atop that awful sense of waste and futility, did he feel ready to consider the Master.But be honest: it was more than consideration; this morning he recognized it as an obsession.Bach and Chopin and Debussy and even old Buxtehude were fine in their places, but for him, Charles Largens, only one composer had all the balance, the power, the complete tightness that music ought to have; so as a pianist might dream of Carnegie (as he once had), or an artist of the Guggenheim, or a literary critic of Finnegans Wake, so Largens longed to base his lifework as musicologist on the works of Beethoven.More now; as Beethoven he might transcend the study of music, and attain the abstract itself.That was the dream that kept him going those years after his own music went dry, the dream that drove him to write essays on the preludes of Moskowski and bore himself to madness with Czerny just because he had been a student of the Master’s; just because that particular essay might draw some attention, make someone cry, Hey! he’s got it! and you could never tell what might attract the men with power, the men with the machines, so you did it all.He wanted to be Beethoven, and these men could do that for him, with their machines.The machines were windows into the past.Not doors, nor even a very clear sort of window; they more revealed the texture of the glass than the scene beyond, for what they did was transfer your consciousness into the mind of someone in the past.After the historians found that subjective impressions of history were not very much more valuable than textbooks and records, the psychologists and scholars took over the vast banks of transfer equipment; they roamed and delved the past like archaeologists in a newly unearthed Greek library.Essays appeared psychoanalyzing Freud.The real reasons for the Emancipation Proclamation were revealed.The Shakespeare/Bacon myth was finally debunked.George Washington’s real name came out.And it was inevitable that the artists, the writers, the musicians, in their mutual despair of ever taking art further than it had already gone in the barren year 2016, came forward eager to learn the inspirations for Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Waiting for Godot, the Beethoven Ninth.To find out if El Greco was really astigmatic; to catch Hemingway’s last thoughts as he triggered the shotgun; to study firsthand the mad genius of Van Gogh; to see the world as the great minds of history saw it.To put together in the sad flat year 2016 a world, piecemeal, from remnants of the pastTime travel, of a sort; it was not real time travel, for that would have been magic, a kind of miracle, and there were no more miracles or magic in the world they had made.It was a world of norms and averages and no extremes, a world where everything had an explanation and a reason, where even this miraculous-seeming tune travel could be expressed in hard clear terms, if you had the math.There were no paradoxes; the mind occupied seemed to have no awareness of its passengers.The passengers could only observe, could not touch the past.One might even jump back into one’s own life and affect it not at all (aside perhaps from some slight déja vu).Of course, the government kept the tightest of reins on the process; so only now, after ten years with the very elite Lincoln Center Research Group, did Charles Largens feel qualified to ask for Beethoven, to accept that last resort.It was his essay on the inspirations of Buxtehude that drew the attention of H.Grueder, chairman of the board deciding past inhabitations [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]