Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Beethoven (2)

(2003)

I know better than to try to sleep, so it's just me and the music. Listening once again to the one person who always pulls me through, no matter what. I can listen to the symphonies or the string quartets anytime, but the sonatas-the Pathétique, especially-are appropriate for nights like tonight, nights when no sleep will come. That sublime suffering, the solitude, the sacred requital of this illimitable expression. The music, always the music.

After a while, before I can stop and think about it, I fall asleep.

Dreaming:

Beethoven. Not the celebrated facsimile of the consecrated composer (the image that often accompanies this effulgent music) staring down sternly at an adoring audience-the people to whom he had dedicated his great gifts-as the applause he can no longer hear surges through a breathless auditorium, but a frail, confused old man, huddled over a candle, awakened from an uneasy slumber and called into the darkness, again, to wrestle with the terrible, silent voices that fill his head.

What sort of God would suffer a man so great to be stripped of the very faculties that once compelled his creations? That refractory grace: continuing to conceive music, in the mind, yet prevented from hearing the sweet crescendo of the final coda. Agonizing over those last movements in the isolation of a lonely hour, perhaps looking to the sky, beseeching supplication, a respite, a return of the courage that once restored him.

A man whose reputed last words were I shall hear in Heaven. Proof of God's existence for the faithful; proof of life's capricious, inscrutable fate, for the faithless.