A Bit of a Mess

The alteration in my domestic circumstances has not resulted in a flowering of reading and listening. Far from it: I've probably listened to less music and read less over the last couple of weeks than over any other similar period this year. It's true that I've been busy with work stuff, but there's still been a fair amount of time on my hands, yet I've felt directionless.

The novel I've got going is Mishima's The Sound of Waves, which we're adopting as one of our IB texts next year, and it's taking me seemingly forever to read. Yet I'm sure I could manage it at a couple of sittings in the right mood. The odd thing is that I'm enjoying the text, but don't feel any great inclination to pick it up once I've put it down. I suppose the narrative has a static quality which is beguiling, in its way, but it doesn't exactly demand attention.

I find myself picking up The Rest Is Noise with far greater frequency, but I'm being careful not to read too fast, I suppose trying to savour the experience. I'm still not past the Second World War and already the magnitude of achievement in music in the last century, I'm now aware, is stunning. It's always been there yet I've never quite grasped it was all happening at once.

Ross is exceptionally good at making the inherently obvious less so and so more real somehow. For example, his observation that 'classical' music acquired sinister overtones as a result of the rise of Nazism, and that composers in the second half of the century in a sense had to contend with such associations, struck me as something I kind of knew but never consciously realised. Similarly I was generally aware of what Prokofiev and Shostakovich suffered under Stalin but I failed to feel the importance of this in their music (and to them as human beings.)

As a younger man I think I was looking for something transcendent in art generally. Now I find I'm stirred by the local, the domestic, the contingent; the experience rooted in the mess of history.