Orsinian Tales

And fourteen—fourteen is such a fearful age, when you find out so fast what you’re capable of being, but also what a toll the world expects.

He had waked her; he had given her what she lacked, and what few men could have given her: the sense of peril, which is the root of love.

I was afraid I’d fail. So I didn’t work.

He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, “you are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, “Listen.” For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.

What the devil do you come to me for? And burst into tears? And then tell me thanks very much for your suggestion but I shall continue to attempt the impossible? The arrogance, the unreasonableness—no, I can endure all that—but the stupidity, the absolute stupidity of artists, I cannot stand it any longer!