Rex Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sound of that music, my head taken a thousand different places by the undulations of the dance. Tunes I could dance to perfection, tunes about which, Petya, I could have taught classes, entire, extensive courses, for I was vastly erudite in the secrets of dance, expert at moving back and forth with an ease conferred by early apprenticeship.
    Or, as the Writer calls it (with reference to Swann): the elementary gymnastics of a man of the world .
7
    But then a triumph and a truth on the Commentator’s part, Petya! The surprise in store for me at the center of that sphere. A thought that forced me to stop in my tracks, my arms falling toward my body like the flywheels of one of Watt’s machines. I drew near in astonishment the moment that evening’s group started playing and watched their performance, stupefied. Never having suspected a thing like that. The way the singers, young black men, were moving across the dais, reaching the edge and retreating, as if tired, weary. The spirit of commentary permeating and making its nest in their innocent souls, the soul of the Commentator speaking through their mouths.
    Songs I myself used to hum a few years ago, a tune which, that very autumn, earlier that autumn, had filled me with happiness each time I heard it sung (by an Englishman, a young Englishman), now commented upon by these musicians with all the disdain and profound sordidness of commentary. Hardened and old as commentators, the young black musicians, not moving toward us like the kind of singer who seeks to convey something to the audience and might even leap into the air, full of emotion. Shifting, rather, from side to side, without ever leaving the floor’s level plane, barricaded, incredulous, with nothing to say about themselves, about their own lives, but something to say, apparently, about the song they were commenting on, as if intoning a Gregorian chant. First a passage, cited in scholarly fashion: author, year, and place of publication. Then they proceeded without pause to comment upon it, words weakly mouthed, in murmurs (orsomething like murmurs). Having lost, generationally, their skill, their faith in new songs, melodies that could make them run to the edge of the dais and put their hands to their chests in a burst of passion. No, never that:
cool
, you know? Arms dangling, peering up from beneath their eyebrows, faces turned toward the floor.
    As if the Commentator himself had waited for me outside the disco to stand up and say: “See? I was right. Even these musicians here … All stories, all combinations of notes, all original melodies having—make no mistake about it!—run out. Nothing left but commentary, as these boys from America have grasped.”
    I didn’t give it a second’s reflection. I saw, outside there, across the whole width of the beach, that this truth was not his. That perhaps there was only this one justification, one principle, for commentary: pedagogical purposes. Only for that reason important. My career as a tutor, all my work as a teacher, running on commentary. And didn’t that make sense? In this case? Rather than hiding it, pretending I had better things to say, something better than teaching you every day about the Book, the gold mine of wisdom that is the Book?
    Though only as a pedagogical method or procedure, I repeat: the method of commentary still execrable in itself. You may be thinking: a certain intelligence, a certain good taste in that, in commentary and the Commentator. The portions of text he ripped steaming from books and spoke about with subtlety and in detail, about the peculiarities of those books, the peculiarities of their authors. This is good; even, at times, praiseworthy. But never acknowledged, as I did from then on with you, declaring openly: yes, this is commentary; yes, these are commentaries. On the contrary, he always tried to seem like something more than a commentator and always avoided citing or commenting