396
PARTISAN REVIEW
The most up-to-date models have the brute force of a tank from the last
phase of World War II and are nearly as loud. A drill used even a few
floors over me shatters my skull. A drill kills thought and inspiration;
it's a bomb exploding inside the building.
Moreover, in front of the building there's a preschool, which an inex–
haustible demography restocks every year with a herd of clamorous
children, murdering and flirting with one another, imitating their seniors
in love and war. One of my neighbors sneezes so loudly that the con–
crete walls of the building shake. Another has hysterical attacks and
screams unceasingly. Each spring the people who live on the other side
of the courtyard put a canary out on the balcony, and its soulless,
mechanical song is closer to the sound of the drill than to that of the
blackbird, the virtuoso among the local wildlife.
I have to wear headphones, and sometimes earplugs underneath the
headphones. Only then does my airplane get off the ground. I have to
admit it doesn't take off every day. Various obstacles and kinds of inter–
ference proliferate; some are external, while others come from within.
Sometimes fog on the runway-the runway being my pine desk, pur–
chased years ago for
400
francs in Levallois-Perret-causes flights to be
delayed. Other times my plane bumps its nose against the wall right
after takeoff, and I miraculously escape with my life, but my ribs and
the fingers on my right hand are broken and the nurse smiles sorrow–
fully. On other occasions snowstorms rage above a different airport, my
destination. The radio is also down, my headphones are dead, the trans–
mitter poles have been toppled by the wind, the wires are tangled. What
should I do? Jump ship, abandon my post? Read?
I often use the headphones solely as a defense against the trivial, tri–
umphant concert of the commonplace that my colossal apartment house
generates. They're a shield, but not quite good enough, they don't get
me off the ground, they just protect me from demography and, imper–
fectly, from the drone of drills. But sometimes it happens that I'm lis–
tening to music as my plane circles near the runway, I'm listening to one
of Bruckner's symphonies, for example the Ninth, whose wild energy
could elevate more than one jumbo jet; or Bach, for example, his cello
suites as played by Janos Starker; or Brubeck, for whom I have a special
soft spot since I first listened to him when I was sixteen; or Beethoven,
for example the funeral march from The Third Symphony, yes, the one
where he erased the dedication to Napoleon so energetically that he
wore a hole in the paper; or Mahler's Ninth, with its glorious first move–
ment
(andante comodo);
or Schumann's third piano trio, whose open–
ing
movement-Bewegt, doch nicht zu rasch-probably
doesn't break
