A mortally young man gets on a train and, descending at an unknown station, enters a town whose name he doesnt know and rents rooms in an ordinary house from an old woman with a mossy growth on her brow. No, Im not going to relate what happens then in the rented lodging, I only wish to recall a single trivial occurrence: passing through the front room, the ill young man believed he heard, in between the thud of his footsteps, a sound coming from next door, a faint, clear, metallic tone- but perhaps it was only an illusion. Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin, he thought... In the story, that small acoustic detail remains inconsequential and unexplained. From the actions standpoint alone, it could have been omitted without loss. The sound simply happens; all by itself; just like that. I think Thomas Mann sounded that faint, clear, metallic tone to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made a golden ring falling into a silver basin). The Book of Laughter and forgetting -Milan Kundera-
Posted on: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 16:52:51 +0000
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