Hail, Hardy, and Musical Introspection

To start yet again with the weather, today was a most interesting spring-like day. I woke up before nine, when it was cloudy. In the course of the morning -- which I spent reading about the Academy Awards and looking at the dresses, drying the dishes, doing beginners' Latin exercises (exciting stuff, about the domina receiving convivae at her villa), and leafing through the Feuilleton section of the Berliner Zeitung -- the sun intermittently appeared. I eventually went for a walk, blithely expecting the sun to emerge again from what I realized at the Rathaus (Schöneberg) to be a sky entirely blanketed with pearly grey. After turning a small round at the Rathaus, where isolated flower and clothing and bakery booths formed the remnants of the matinal market, I returned. Then a light sprinkling of rain began, intensifying into pelting precipitation, and rapidly reaching the stage of thick driving hail. I did not mind this at all, though the hail forced me to blink. By the time I had taken off my scarf and jacket back in the apartment, the hail was perhaps half a centimeter deep, and the green Hauptstraße median and the rooftops looked as if it had lightly snowed. But then the sun did come out again, and a universal dripping began -- quite lovely, in fact.

Throughout the rest of the day I was inclined to be cross, especially because I've been hanging around at home too much, but I didn't become openly disagreeable. I read articles in the New York Review of Books about the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 (which we learned about in History 12) ; Thomas Hardy; James Laughlin, the publisher; and Pedro Almódovar and Volver. Of Thomas Hardy's books, I've read The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the Return of the Native. When I first read the first and third books they were a sort of revelation to me, because there was something (I don't know what) in Hardy's writing that I felt I had missed everywhere else without knowing that I had. At the same time I'm still uncomfortable with the moral turbulence of the books. On the whole I like The Mayor of Casterbridge the best, probably because I am callous as to what happened to the unfortunate mayor so long as his daughter didn't meet some tragic end. Also because Donald Farfrae and Elizabeth provide the matter-of-fact grounding that I like every book to have -- and that is, for instance, a trait that I find really appealing in Jane Eyre. By the way, I don't think that my opposition to the ending of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is solely based on the fact that it is unhappy; I think that it is melodramatic and unfair to the character of Tess, even in a desperate state.

I found the article on Thomas Hardy interesting and there was much information that was new to me. But parts of it verged on "too much information." Altogether the articles in the NYRB that deal with the private lives of well-known cultural figures interest me to a certain extent and repel me beyond that. One might say that I shouldn't read them then -- well, I do skip over parts or stop reading. I don't really care about the sex lives of great people, for instance. It may be my years of Victorian-era reading, but I think that there is much of the personality and the intellect that has nothing to do with sex, and that can be discussed interestingly, tastefully, and with respect for privacy. It similarly annoys me when character flaws of the dead and living are picked out with annihilating efficiency. Is it really fair that people who are famous are not only besieged with scrutiny while they live, but also subject to scrutiny and more often than not misinterpretation when they are dead? That said, the character criticisms of the Review are probably mostly just and sometimes amusing, but I think they could be more sparing.

For dinner Papa made delicious sweet and sour pork and chicken. The colours, appearance, flavours -- everything was harmonious. I made rice on the side; it turned out beautifully, though my method only consisted of boiling the salty water, dumping in the rice, stirring it twice, then leaving and forgetting it so that Papa had to take care of it. It contrasted agreeably with the irregularly done brown rice I made a few days ago, which much resembled gruel.

In the evening I played the piano, but not very well. My fingers are cold, and above all I'm not attuned to the music. I have been thinking a lot lately how well I can play, and my browsing of classical music clips on YouTube has greatly helped. In the end, I think, my understanding of the music and the originality with which I sometimes interpret it are unusually good, but my technique and lack of incisive intelligence as well as mental clarity present obstacles that I could only overcome if I really, truly wanted to pursue it. My pedalling is bad, trills and ornaments of every sort uneven, tone often muddy, fingers uneven and not strong or agile or quick, hands not able to reach more than an octave plus one, arpeggios particularly bad. I still tend to think of notes one at a time, rather than as sets of four, for example; my mind is not quite quick enough to play notes in quick succession above a certain low level. I haven't properly memorized a piece in years. I don't know anything about harmony or counterpoint, and little about the history of music, though I do know the "rudiments" of theory. And I don't have the patient, relaxed persistence that allows me to experiment with fingering, for example, as I should. Instead I rely on flashes of intuition and general mental development over time to correct my playing. All in all, when I play at the piano, it seems to me that the music emerges in spite of my hands, and not through their mediation.

Well, I'll see again tomorrow, but it seems to me that this is not an attempt at self-deprecation but an honest assessment as far as I can make it. Either way, I'm not in bad spirits, because I've read a nice online novel.