Gertrude Read Online Free PDF

my traveling rug over my knees, wearily and unrestrainedly giving way to foolish thoughts. Everything that young blood desired and hoped for, parties and the gaiety of dancing, the love of women and adventure, the triumph of strength and love, lay on another distant shore, far removed and inaccessible to me forever. Even that wild, defiant period of half-forced gaiety, which had ended in my toboggan accident, then seemed in my memory to be beautiful and colored in a paradisiacal way, like a lost land of pleasure, the echo of which still came across to me with bacchanal intoxication from the distance. And at times, when storms passed over at night, when the continual sound of the cold, down-pouring rain was drowned by the strong, plaintive rustling through the storm-swept fir wood, and when a thousand inexplicable sounds of a sleepless summer night echoed through the girders of the roof of the frail house, I lay dreaming hopelessly and restlessly about life and the tumult of love, raging and reproaching God. I felt like a miserable poet and dreamer whose most beautiful dream was only a thin, colored soap bubble, while thousands of others in the world, happy in their youthful strength, stretched out joyous hands for all the prizes of life.
    Just as I seemed to see all the glorious beauty of the mountains, and everything that my senses enjoyed, as through a veil and from a great distance, so also did there arise between me and the frequent wild outbursts of grief a veil and a slight feeling of strangeness, and soon the brightness of the days and the grief of the nights were like external voices which I could listen to with a heart free of pain. I saw and felt myself like a mass of moving clouds, like a battlefield full of fighting troops, and whether I experienced pleasure and enjoyment, or grief and depression, both moods seemed clearer and more comprehensible to me. They freed themselves from my soul and approached me from the outside in the form of harmonies and a series of sounds that I heard as if in my sleep and that took possession of me against my will.
    It was in the quiet of one evening when I was returning from the rocky side of the valley that I understood it all clearly for the first time, and as I meditated upon it and found myself to be a riddle, it suddenly occurred to me what it all signified—that it was the return of those strange remote hours of which I had a premonition-filled foretaste when I was younger. And with this memory, that wonderful clarity returned, the almost glasslike brightness and transparency of feelings where everything appeared without a mask, where things were no longer labeled sorrow or happiness, but everything signified strength and sound and creative release. Music was arising from the turmoil, iridescence and conflict of my awakened sensibilities.
    I now viewed the bright days, the sunshine and the woods, the brown rocks and the distant snow-covered mountains with heightened feelings of happiness and joy, and with a new conception. During the dark hours I felt my sick heart expand and beat more furiously, and I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether I felt pain or joy, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.
    I could not write this music down; it was still strange to me and its territory was unfamiliar. But I could hear it. I could feel the world in its perfection within me, and I could also retain something of it, a small part and echo of it, reduced and translated. I thought about it and concentrated on it for days. I found that it could be expressed with two violins and began in complete innocence, like a fledgling trying its wings, to write down my first sonata.
    As I played the first movement on my violin in my room one morning, I was