(no subject)
A few days ago I was laying on my couch staring at the ceiling and thinking of something I had once thought. A record of Mahler’s 9th symphony played loudly in the corner, a particular interpretation which I hadn’t listen to in several years. I had put it on to beautify the bland chaos of my solitude, but something seemed to have muted its power and it didn’t sound good at the moment so I turned it off in disgust. It had always been true for me that if I listened to Mahler in solitude it had the ability to call forth my truest and most delicate self which, like some frail glass ghost hiding in the subterranean labyrinth of humiliated reflection, never appeared otherwise. But now it seemed as flat as the external emotions I was trying to erode. It was bland, and listening to what had once bloomed and now withered was like feeling the tectonic plates of time shifting in every direction, the memory of its inspired history crumbling under its boring present. To hear that music again was to be replenished by the eternal sadness of a strengthening past.