inspo/revelation

SHE COMES IN rosy from the cold. Her scarf trails as she pushes the door shut behind her. The Requiem score drops from her hands. She bends to pick it up, and when she straightens, their eyes catch, spilling everything. Scared, defiant, pleading, thuggish. Wanting to be home again, with an old friend.

“Hey! You haven’t budged from that chair.”

“Good rehearsal?”

“The best!”

“I’m glad. What sections did you sing?”

She crosses to where he sits. Something of their old rhythm. She hugs him, Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck. Before he can stand, she slips past, into the kitchen, smelling on herself that blend of salt and bleach. “I’ll just take a quick shower before bed.”

She’s a smart woman, but she has never had much patience with the obvious. Nor does she think him capable of simple observation. She showered twenty minutes before heading out to sing her Brahms.

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.

I went home and cried on K.’s shoulder. It was both of us who pooled resources together to do what we could for my dad. For months, K. had been dipping his hand into his pocket for the man who almost made us impossible, the man who would hate him on sight. It was somewhere in that breakdown that I changed my mind. The next day, I took K. to my father’s bedside. My person stood by me, watching us. Where is she? my father asked, ignoring the obvious. I stared back my response, no words involved, just eye to eye, man to man. I saw it click. He swallowed and then opened his mouth to talk. Nothing came out. I repeated myself with a closed mouth, hands in my pockets, staring him down. I felt K. turn to stone in fear. The money we’d both spent bullied my father in front of me, its knuckles ready for his teeth. Do you understand? the money asked him. He shrank and I almost pitied him. I reached for K.’s hand, and feeling how much it had been sweating, I lifted his hand to my mouth and pressed my lips to it before holding his palm to my chest. Are you sure you understand, Dad? I asked. By then, my voice was hot iron. No one, I decided there and then, is allowed to kill me twice. Using my child-voice he said, Yes sir, and using his dad-voice, I said, Good boy.

[...] As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.

And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.

I went to this museum, and it's in this long hall of high-ceilinged old salons. And it starts with, I don't know whether they're Neolithic, but very old musical instruments, and it progresses through. Of course, most of their musical instruments are from the last couple of centuries in Western Europe. I didn't actually make it all the way through; I was like one or two salons from the end and I was standing there and here was a piano that had belonged to Leopold Mozart. And the piano that Brahms used for practicing. And the piano that Haydn had in his house.

And I had this little epiphany that the reason that I was having trouble finding another software project to get excited about was not that I was having trouble finding a project. It was that I wasn't excited about software anymore. As crazy as it may seem now, a lot of my motivation for going into software in the first place was that I thought you could actually make the world a better place by doing it. I don't believe that anymore. Not really. Not in the same way.

This little lightning flash happened and all of a sudden I had the feeling that the way—well, not the way to change the world for the better, but the way to contribute something to the world that might last more than a few years was to do music. That was the moment when I decided that I was going to take a deep breath and walk away from what I'd been doing for 50 years.

I don’t remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. “Sang de satin.” From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin”? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish translating “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin,” I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can’t remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.