Lying in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page A

down here and used the remote to change the music. I have never been able to listen to it without her.
    So now, alone, I am listening to Bach’s Inventions . All the evening’s early discs are for solo instruments, to reflect my solitude. I have chosen the recording on the clavichord, as distinguished from the harpsichord or piano, because it is the “smallest” of the instruments, the least intrusive, the most homey. It was the domestic keyboard of choice, and the most practical, at the time. I thought it fitting to lead off my music tonight because I am planning to have so domestic an evening for myself, so comfortable and cozy, and the kind of journey of self-discovery that only solitude and darkness and the absence of one’s beloved can provide.
    I believe in these contrasts. There is no desire without deprivation. There is no hunger without depletion. It is not simply a matter of the tempo of life, as it was in the high Renaissance, when a slow dance would be followed by a fast. It is as much a matter of texture, as it became in the Baroque. Musically, I see it as the difference between the stylus phantasticus and the stylus canonicus . Philosophically,it is the dreaminess of Apollo awakening into the rapture of Dionysius.
    And I love the name Inventions . It suggests a certain improvisation, even chicanery, though Bach seems to have used it to mean something as simple as motif. He stole the name from some teaching pieces by the little-known Antonio Bonporti and wrote his own Inventions so his eldest and most beloved son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who was ten years old at the time, might have something interesting and instructive to play while learning the clavichord.
    It is as if your father, to teach you to dance, provides you with instructions on how to leap from the floor and not come down until you so desire.
    When I have thought of having a child, I have been either inspired or intimidated by the example of such magnificent didacticism. I have wondered what I would hope to pass on to him: my philomathic passions; my ability to be both of the world but not in it and in the world but not of it; my fidelity to ideas and to the flesh of one woman; my control over the chaos of life that might, by a stretch, be equated with the taming of chaos that Bach attained in his music, that transport “from the world of unrest to a world of peace,” as Albert Schweitzer put it in writing about The Well-Tempered Clavier , that other, more taxing collection of teaching pieces that Bach himself described as being “for the use and practice of young musicians who want to learn and for the amusement of those who already know this study.”
    Amusement! His unaccustomed modesty is a weapon, and so can his music be unless you learn not to compete with its transcendence. If you listen to such music and say, “Why can’t I do that?” you will hate yourself to the end of your days. It is not art but the failure to achieve it thatdrives one mad.
    Know your limits. Will I have the courage to pass that on? It is surely the hardest of life’s lessons.
    Love your mother.
    Love her not the way I do, for I am her husband, but love her just as well.
    Love your father too and in so doing redeem all that is past.
    But what good are rubrics? Wilhelm Friedemann, on whom Bach bestowed the purest of his paternal love and the most patient and gentle of his contrapuntal initiations, ended up a drunk and, worse, stopped believing in his gift.
    Even Bach could not provide ease in the world for his child. Not for any of them. And he had twenty.
    I have spent much time pondering what evidence there is of his prodigious sexual life. All those children aside, there is the serious trouble he got himself into with the authorities at Arnstadt when, as they wrote it up, “he caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft and let her make music there.”
    I picture him, as I listen to his Inventions ,