"His situation wasn’t really so different from anybody else’s. He’d only got to the end of the road a little earlier. But it was the same for the rock stars and for the jazz musicians, for the novelists and the poets (definitely for the poets); it was the same for the business executives, the biologists, the computer programmers, the accountants, the flower arrangers. Artist or non-artist, academic or non-academic, Menno van Delft or Rodney Webber, even for Darlene and James of the Reeves Collection Agency: it didn’t matter. No one knew what the original music sounded like. You had to make an educated guess and do the best you could. For whatever you played there was no indisputable tuning or handwritten schematic, and the visa you needed in order to see the Master’s keyboard was always denied. Sometimes you thought you heard the music, especially when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to reproduce the sound.
Everybody’s life was early music."
Damn, but Jeffrey Eugenides can really put the words together. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm at the end of my road but, holy shimoly, this short story really resonated with me when I read it this afternoon.
(Link to the right)
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