I sit alone in my room and listen to Glenn Gould. “The Little Bach Book” unfolds laboriously, as the recently acquired cassette tape grinds rather loudly in competition with the piano. I get up and sit farther away to avoid the interference, but my hearing has already become conditioned to the annoying sound—I hear it no matter how far I sit. Then I imagine myself in my room listening to Glenn Gould and being annoyed by the cassette tape: the grinding sound fades away, and I see myself smiling at the Cambridge City Hall through the window.

To Cherie Wendelken

Addendum I (January 20, 1985)

Even something frightening may appear poetic if you stand back and regard it simply as a shape, and the eerie may make an excellent picture if you think of it as something that is completely independent of yourself. Exactly the same is true with disappointed love. Providing that you can divorce yourself from the pain of a broken heart and, conjuring up before you the tenderness, the sympathy, the despair and yes, even the very excess of pain itself, can view them objectively, then you have aesthetic, artistic material. There are those who purposely imagine their hearts to be broken, and crave for the pleasure they get from this form of emotional self-flagellation. The average person dismisses them as foolish, or even a little mad, but there is absolutely no difference, inasmuch as they both have an artistic standpoint, between the man who draws an outline of misery for himself and then leads his life within it, and him whose delight it is to paint a landscape which never existed, and then to live in a potted universe of his own creation. This being the case then, there are many artists who, outside their everyday lives, in the role of artist are more foolish, more insane than the ordinary man. We tramp around the countryside in search for suitable material, continually complaining from morning till night of the hardships we have to undergo. When, however, we are describing our journey to someone else, we show not even the slightest hint of discontent. Not only do we tell of the interesting and pleasant things that happened to us, which is only natural, but we even babble on proudly about those hardships long ago of which at the time we complained so bitterly. This is not done with any conscious intent of deceiving or cheating the listener. The inconsistency arises because while actually on the journey our feelings are just the same as those of anyone else. It is only afterwards when we tell our experiences to others that we revert to being artists. Putting it as a formula, I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in a triangle which remains after the angle that we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.

From Natsume Soseki’s The Three-Cornered World, New York: Perigee Books, 1982, pp. 47-48.

Addendum II (November 12, 1995)

Cherie was very shy when she visited me in my Cambridge apartment. I do not remember what happened that night, except that nothing happened. I guess I realized she was too neurotic for a casual relationship, and I let her go. But I remember that we exchanged a few explicit words about our feelings for each other when she was about to leave. She was standing by the door, already in her coat, when I said something that made her lean against the wall and slide down into a crouch. When she looked up, her eyes were flooded with fear and hope. I have no idea what it was that I said, but I remember that I knew that she was ready to follow me to bed if I only reached for her. Instead, I helped her up and escorted her to the elevator. Although I have never regretted my chivalry, I now realize that I would not have forgotten my magical words had we consummated our friendship that night.