A Greater Music by Bae Suah; Smith Deborah;

Author:Bae, Suah; Smith, Deborah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2016-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Music was my other great love aside from reading, and the reason I made such an effort to stick to a strict budget. If money had been no object, I would have bought new CDs every week. Joachim didn’t have a stereo, only the kitchen radio, but he’d borrowed some computer speakers from a college friend for me to hook up to a handheld CD player. CDs were expensive, so I liked to go the store on Friedrichstrasse and use their listening station, but since there were always other people waiting to use it you couldn’t really listen to anything for very long. Plus, you had to stand up the whole time. Of course, you could always go up to the second floor, wait in line at the customer service center, hand over your ID so they would let you borrow one of their CD players, for in-store use only, take it downstairs to the classical music corner and listen to whatever you liked for as long as you liked, in one of their comfortable chairs. While I was saving up, I listened over and over again to one of the few CDs I already owned, Kim Kashkashian performing Shostakovich’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. And so, on the night I’m remembering, the last night of the blizzard that year, with the road to the cemetery completely blanketed in snow and thus indistinguishable from its surroundings, with Joachim’s bicycle no more than a smooth white mound, and the light from the lamp lost in the swirling snow, with the chill leaching in through the windowpane, I cracked Forms of Human Coexistence open and laid it on the kitchen table, put my feet up on a chair (I was wearing two pairs of thick woolen socks), and listened to Shostakovich’s final sonata. I became Jakob Hein from Leipzig, “coexisting with humans” in a state of great perplexity, experiencing all the inconveniences of linguistic communication on the crowded, diverse New York streets—he recounted how he’d assumed he’d be able to get by perfectly well with his English skills, but in New York the first person who’d been more or less able to understand him was a Korean taxi driver who’d only been living there for two months. There was nothing in the book that struck me as unusual—New Yorkers seem to be incapable of being surprised by anything any more, and consider nothing strange these days—and so, even though it wasn’t as though I was hankering for something less familiar or more surprising, and in spite of its short, light-hearted essays, I was bored. I only managed a single sentence before I turned to gaze out of the window, listening to the music with my chin in my hand, threw away the cold dregs of the coffee, made some more, rummaged around in the fridge but found nothing new then, after one more sentence, gazed out of the window again. And then, finally, the third movement began.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.