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

„He had also learnt about the destruction of the human soul. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes. A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself, and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself. Any single method was sufficient; though if all three were present, the outcome was irresistible.“

„The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of the old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant's skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change […]; and there is no cave of conscience to be found.“

„He thought of suicide, of course, when he signed the paper put in front of him; but since he was already committing moral suicide, what would be the point of physical suicide? It wasn't even a question of lacking the courage to buy and hide and swallow the pills. It was rather that now, at this juncture, he lacked even the self-respect that suicide required.“

„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.

„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?‘“

„Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. […] Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake. […] And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.“

“…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.”