All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > The Noise of Time > Status Update

„What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves — the music of our being — which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

This was what he held to.“

He asked himself a question. It went like this:

Lenin found music depressing.
Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music.
Khrushchev despised music.
Which is the worst for a composer?

[…] Death cures the hunchback, as Khrushchev liked to say. He was not born one, but perhaps he had become one, morally, spiritually. A questioning hunchback. And perhaps death cures the questions as well as the questioner.

„And of course, the intransigent logic ran in the opposite irection as well. If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption.“

„They wanted martyrs to prove the regime’s wickedness. But you were to be the martyr, not them. And how many martyrs would it take to prove that the regime was truly, monstrously, carnivorously evil? More, always more. They wanted the artist to be a gladiator, publicly fighting wild beasts, his blood staining the sand. That's what they required: in Pasternak's words, ‚Total death, seriously?‘“

“…he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? […] And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: […] that love's last days had come.”

“Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony — perhaps, some-times, so he hoped — might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music?”

“When truth-speaking became impossible — because it led to immediate death — it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony. Because the tyrant's ear is rarely tuned to hear it. […]
But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.”

“Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts - the weak parts - of most people worked. It had spent years killing priests and closing churches, but if soldiers fought more stubbornly under the blessing of priests, then priests would be brought back […].”

“Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep’x as they say. […] Never a mass arrest; just one victim, and then the next night another — a system which ramped up the fear for those who remained, who had temporarily survived.”

“He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes […] he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.”