Very strange regions indeed!
“Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen’s departure he had rarely been in the mood for music and in any case the partite that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne, which followed, that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their close-argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and they were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the disclosure. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the while sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.”
(From The Ionian Mission, 8th book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey Maturin series)
Now, that is the kind of picture one does not think possible to find in a nautical adventure. But O’Brian is full of such surprises. One of the many things I really love about the Aubrey- Maturin series is that O’Brian builds three-dimensional characters, with as many layers of complication as one would expect in real flesh and blood people. Jack and Stephen are only amateur musicians but especially for Jack music seems to be something more than a pass-time or the passion of the dilettante. O’Brian says that for Jack, who was a rather simple man and not religious at all, although pious to the letter, music is his only chance to get in touch with the sublime. There is certainly mysticism there involved. But then I think that everything that opens our mind to our own self to, what we call self-realization, is in a way or at least feels mystical. We fear such things or at least feel awe of them, because the most dangerous thing to learn in this life is, in my opinion, one’s own self.