The Journal of a Disappointed Man

April 11. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out --there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An epileptic vision or an opium dream--Dostoievsky or De Quincey set to music. In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to "carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.