258
PARTISAN REVIEW
soul, well, the life ofa music teacher isn't much different. Instead of
words, it is microscopic specks which contain the miracle of the sim–
ple note which I try to smuggle inconspicuously into the hearts of my
more attentive students. Although they don't ask, I can see in their
eyes the age-old question of why it is that whenever they touch music
they begin to shake and tremble uncontrollably, while at other times
they are filled with shame at their own imperfection and run off sob–
bing into the woods. Or, they ask, how did it all start with me
anyway? How did I wind up in this blissful imprisonment, from
which I certainly have no intention of trying to hack my way out?
Quite the contrary, in fact. Where did it all begin? Perhaps it was a
lark singing high above a field of ripening rye, a train rumbling in
the distance somewhere in a fog-enshrouded valley, or one of my
coat buttons brushing against the metal gate of a chateau garden.
And that faint clink, a chance sound, that germ of a melancholy
refrain stuck in my ears, and I stood there rooted to the spot, bound
and chained. I listened, almost moved to tears, and you would have
needed at least a pair of oxen to extract me from that embrace as you
would pull some giant turnip from the ground, and even then you
would have cursed and cracked the whip at me for resisting them.
And what if, after groping in the golden twilight, you succeed in find–
ing that hypnotizing variety of tones: it is waiting for you like an un–
familiar face, so that from the very beginning it is difficult to guess
whom the face belongs to and where this unpredictable current will
drag us. Who are you, you ask, and what are you doing here? And
how is it I've never heard of you before? But the face is silent in that
same contrite manner in which the breath stops in music.
If
you
want to enjoy a closing forte, you have to extract tlie answer by kiss–
ing until the ardor of your feelings causes it to melt away in your em–
brace, note by note, until only empty lines remain on the pink
paper, and you hang on them by your fingers like a thief on a fence,
and they find you there, a hopeless case, a vagrant, a ragamuffin,
completely in the power of this profligate seductress.
I accidentally grazed a few piano keys with my elbow. It
sounded like the muffled background of many voices, .a rumbling of
thunder or an angry bear, and right away I came out of the swoon of
my birthday thoughts. Once a year, I comforted myself, I can in–
dulge in such an extravagance, let my imagination go, like some
kind of Robinson Crusoe without his trusty man Friday. Whenever
I found myself in trouble, a French horn would sound somewhere
