The Adventures of a Night Owl

Today it was a special day in that I had stayed up the whole preceding night. Mostly I watched classical music videos on YouTube -- Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, Vladimir Horowitz, Emil Gilels, etc. I alternately have bits of Beethoven's Sonata appassionata, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and a prelude, and one of Scarlatti's sonatas stuck in my head. There was a video in Japanese about the Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, with whose interpretation of pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier I really like, and whose interpretation of Mozart I like too. Then there was Horowitz's February 1, 1968 Carnegie Hall recital in full; I was struck again how beautifully he brings Scarlatti's sonatas to life. At the same time I read online novels and checked up on an online forum. Also, I began to take a look at photos of as many French castles as I could, hoping to find a closer prototype for my Revolution story. There is one tall, stately chateau with nearly a Scottish air standing splendidly erect on an outcropping in front of the stern, towering backdrop of the Alps. On its website there is a photo of the chateau library, which is essentially my ideal, and gave me the same teary-eyed feeling that some of the most touching music did.

By the time that everyone else unwillingly began to awaken (with the exception of T., who had shared my vigil) I was in very good spirits, though my eyes were somewhat tired and the mirror informed me that I was looking pale. I prepared porridge and eggs, and mentally planned to clean up the kitchen later on. But the awakening sleepers were woefully tired. As for Mama and J., they were and are in the throes of a bad cold. J. usually looks pale and wan, but today he has unquestionably outdone himself. He took Dickens-orphan jokes in good part as he reclined on the sofa. I read out the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities and the first three and a half pages of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War to him while (or should I say whilst?) attempting a British accent, after which he looked quite cheerful. Then he had to go to school, having had only the first hour off.

I went shopping and amused myself on the internet again and played the piano while the others were at school. The piano went quite well, perhaps because the bad-playing-patch has just naturally faded away, or because I was in a receptive mood for music, or because my mind was too tired for uncertainty about notes. First of all I copied down and analyzed the first few measures of Claude Daquin's "Coucou." This means, for example, that I noted the key, saw how and where the sound of the cuckoo is imitated, and realized that I should probably make the second bar be a fainter echo of the first. Then I played Bach inventions and sinfonias, pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin mazurkas and bits of waltzes as well as polonaises and nocturnes, and bits of Mozart and Haydn sonatas, followed by pieces from my Grade 7 and 8 conservatory notebooks. Also, for the very first time I sight-read (slowly and painfully) all of Chopin's "Heroic" Polonaise, which I have determined to master, though I am still undecided whether it is merely a show-off piece or not.

Then I prepared dinner: chicken soup, rice, asparagus (from Spain, and very pale-looking with a purplish tinge that seemed to turn greenish during cooking), and apple sauce. The "Suppenhuhn," or "soup chicken," that I got, turned out to be a particularly meagre specimen. My battle with it when I tried to separate meat from bone and skin (the skin did separate beautifully, though) was, in my view, a fairly convincing argument for vegetarianism. Papa, who ended up doing the majority of the dissection work, said that the chicken was unusually rubbery. At least the broth tasted good, aswim as it was with leek and onion and carrot and chicken flavour. It had been a peculiar experience to shop before ten o'clock. New stock had apparently been recently delivered to the store, and it was a quintessential consumerist experience to see a wonderful array of products crowding the shelves of which I usually behold only a sad contingent after its ranks have already been much reduced.

Anyway, in the evening Mama and J. weren't much better. J. lay sleeping for a while on the sofa, colourful silk scarf around his throat, pillows behind him, and a blanket over him, with a water-soaked white washcloth on his forehead, with his head at an angle. For some reason I was reminded of one of Goya's paintings of the Spanish Civil War. He was and probably still is quite pale (as was or is Mama), the skin somewhat shiny, the mouth unusually dark, and the hollow around his eyes reddish. The effect was heightened by his very dark shirt. Based on my online novel reading, I might say that he looked like a consumptive, and I was much impressed by the ghastliness of his looks. I admit I made quite a few flippant remarks in the vein of my earlier orphan jokes, but J. doesn't really seem to mind it. And certainly I didn't (and couldn't reasonably) accuse him of hypochondria. Poor miserable little fellow.

The only other thing of note to me that occurred in the day was that someone from an environmental organization was going door to door. I've been worrying about doing my part for the environment, and the person was nice, so I agreed to shell out 100 Euro annually (the recommended donation being 2-3 Euros monthly) for the organization. It turns out from a speedy consultation of the website that the work of the organization is more in the lobbying/eco-friendly-social-gathering direction than much of the practical assistance I prefer, but it is certainly reputable and I haven't felt remorse yet.