Some days come along, when finally, you get tired of all the hype. Sure, hype is how you make money selling people things. My line of work, my 'day job,' the hype is about wine, tying into a lot of other hype about wine. And I myself get sucked into too, and fall prey to believing that I too need wine, more than I need. I get hyped into another staff going away party, another bar, another day I will feel like crap.

Hype, the great distraction, the great bombardment we receive from morning to night, compelling even ourselves to sell something to the 'admiring bog,' the verbal punishment of loud voices, the suggestion that each must join in with the din, or else be irrelevant. Caught by the voices, the many demons, of hype we cannot hear the few voices that are clear, as wisdom would never vaunt itself, but simply be wisdom. (Could we imagine a broadcast voice selling wisdom? PBS does it sometimes, somehow.)

You write one book. And that's enough. For that one book is the anchor of your thinking. Okay, maybe right another one to further clarify, but one must avoid that whole model of book selling, cranking out the formulaic. That may be one kind of writing, one form of entertainment, one way to make yourself a money-earning author, but it may not fulfill that grand purpose of the writer to be a kind of philosopher, a proponent of ideas.

Beethoven loved playing on variations. Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting has a passage of listening to the later Beethoven sonatas with his father, after his father had a stroke, his old man pointing to one of them knowingly, as if within its mathematics the maestro was drilling down to the center of reality. There are, of course, the Diabelli Variations. Beethoven, over and over, finding the theme, producing logical variation farther and farther afield.

I have written one book. And somehow there is something right to it. And realizing its correctness, its accuracy, the interlocked strength of its poetry pointing in a direction, I am tired of hype. No, the writer who writes only one book is not a fool. Rather, he has found something worthy to say in his long search.

The artist, in his lonely work, is susceptible to hype and fixations and obsessions and attachments. Perhaps the part of the mind which likes folklore and old stories leaves one open to the tug of advertisements and distractions. Perhaps even the artist more so, but perhaps in finding himself so, he is all the more wary of the risk, in greater need of the solitary time, untouched upon by the shouts of television and the internet and personal devices, the time spent in contact with dreams and thoughts.


I am a barman. A job of exile. A job to make money because one's own work as an intellectual, as an artist, seems like no accomplishment. As if I am at the dead end I am at because of my own political beliefs. The reward I get for waiting on people is that I am treated like I am an idiot. I am idiot for the job I have. I am an idiot for the life I lead. I am an idiot for the things I think of. That is, if one were to listen to a certain way of lumping things together. How could I possibly be intelligent? How could I have wholesome notions of life and family?

Once he called me into his room. The variations from the Opus 111 sonata were open on the piano. "Look," he said, pointing to the music (he had lost the ability to play the piano), "look." He kept trying to explain something important to me, but the words he used were completely unintelligible, and seeing that I didn't understand him, he looked at me in amazement and said, "That's strange."
I knew he what he wanted to talk about, of course. He had been involved with the topic a long time. Beethoven had felt a sudden attachment to the variation form toward the end of his life. At first glance it might seem the most superficial of forms, a showcase for technique, the type of work better suited to a lacemaker than to Beethoven. But Beethoven made it one of the most distinguished forms (for the first time in the history of music) and imbued it with some of his finest meditations.

What Beethoven discovered in his variations was another space and another direction. In that sense they are a challenge to undertake the journey, another invitation au voyage.
The variation form is the form of maximum concentration. It enables the composer to limit himself to the matter at hand, to go straight to the heart of it. The subject matter is a theme, which often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes as deeply into those sixteen measures as if he had gone down a mine to the bowels of the earth.
The journey to the second infinity is no less adventurous than the journey of the epic, and closely parallels the physicist's descent into the wondrous innards of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther from the original theme, which bears no more resemblance to the final variation than a flower to its image under the microscope.

It is no wonder, then, that the variation form became the passion of the mature Beethoven, who (like Tamina and like me) knew all too well that there is nothing more unbearable than losing a person we have loved--those sixteen measures and the inner universe of their infinite possibilities.

From Part Six, The Angels, of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a novel by Milan Kundera, excerpts from part iii, and part vii, pages 160-161, and pages 164-165, HarperPerennial edition.

see also: Beethoven Sonata No. 32 in C MInor, Opus 111 / Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile. And also his Ouvertüre, Opus 62, "Coriolan," for further example of variation taken to the symphonic orchestra, an entrancing restatement of a theme, the maestro's study of the texture of symphonic instruments. A piece that justly inhabits the same vinyl as the Berlin Philharmonic of Symphonie #9 in D Minor, Opus 125, conducted by Herbert Von Karajan.

I am an idiot. I have written one book, a novel. And tomorrow I will go and face my hod-carrier job, leaving the sweet world of ideas, to entertain a number of guests.

The barman goes off, to play variations. Wine tasting night. Minervois tasting with Charles of Williams Corner wine imports.