Archives for April 4, 2006

In case you’re wondering, I overdid it, though not drastically, and definitely not according to the lunatic standards of my pre-illness days. In a nutshell, I stayed up very late Sunday working on Hotter Than That, then spent most of Monday editing what I’d written and turning out this week’s drama column for The Wall Street Journal. Smoke is now coming out of my ears.

My plan for Tuesday is threefold: (1) Spend a nice long chunk of time at the gym. (2) Sit on the couch and watch three or four episodes of the first season of The Equalizer, currently airing on the Sleuth Channel. (3) Do no work. (That includes blogging.)

Later.

“Because of the doctor’s remark while they were up in the old Portuguese fort, Erik put on the beginning of the last act of ‘Tristan.’ The recollection gave an added poignancy to the music. The strange and subtle little tune that the shepherd played on his reed, when he scanned the wide sea and saw no sail, was melancholy with blighted hope. But it was another pang that wrung the doctor’s heart. He remembered Covent Garden in the old days and himself, in evening clothes, sitting in a stall on the aisle; in the boxes were women in tiaras, with pearls round their necks; the King, obese, with great pouches under his eyes, sat in the corner of the omnibus box; on the other side, in the corner, looking over the orchestra, the Baron and the Baroness de Meyer sat together, and she catching his eye bowed. There was an air of opulence and of security. Everything in its grand manner seemed so well-ordered, the thought of change never crossed the mind. Richter conducted. How passionate that music was, how full and with what a melodious splendour it unrolled itself sonorously upon the senses! But he had not heard in it then that something shoddy, blatant and a trifle vulgar, a sort of baronial buffet effect, that now somewhat disconcerted him. It was magnificent, of course, but a little frowsty; his ear had grown accustomed in China to complications more exquisite and harmonies less suave. He was used to a music pregnant with suggestion, illusive and nervous, and the brutal statement of facts a trifle shocked the fastidiousness of his taste.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner