It should have been the happiest of happy endings, yet Winn, whose second book The Wild Silence is published next month, admits the reality wasn’t that simple. “I think when you’ve lived that way in that complete natural state then returning to what we would consider normal felt abnormal,” she says. “It felt completely false to be living in a village and there was also this almost overwhelming sense of not being able to walk away.”
Some time ago, I woke up in a hotel room unable to determine where I was in the world. The room was like any other these days, with its neutral bedding, uncomfortable bouclé lounge chair, and wood-veneer accent wall—tasteful, but purgatorial. The eerie uniformity extended well beyond the interior design too: The building itself felt like it could’ve been located in any number of metropolises across the globe. From the window, I saw only the signs of ubiquitous brands, such as Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. I thought about phoning down to reception to get my bearings, but it felt too much like the beginning of an episode of The Twilight Zone. I travel a lot, so it was not the first or the last time that I would wake up in a state of placelessness or the accompanying feeling of déjà vu.
Yet I worry that people will grow digitally distant from what is for me and for many a defining element of classical music: the sheer sensual pleasure of being immersed in natural (that is, not electronically enhanced) sound, when a piece is performed by gifted artists in an acoustically vibrant space. Of course, electronic elements have been incorporated into music for several generations: Milton Babbitt’s computer music, Pierre Boulez’s delicate use of electronic enhancements, innumerable works that blend traditional instruments with rock guitars and drum sets. Still, the vast majority of classical performances involve traditionally trained voices and instruments that haven’t changed much in centuries — performing without a trace of amplification.
“Either woe or well-being, sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed,” writes Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse. To be engulfed, according to Barthes, involves an “outburst of annihilation which effects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment” and for Nina, the troubled protagonist of Sarah Gerard’s True Love, engulfment is the mechanism by which she annihilates herself — mostly in despair and occasionally in fulfillment.
Perhaps it was this obsession with letters, the beauty of their shape and the world of possibilities encoded in each one, that can explain the curious second proposal scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina (she rejected his first) in which the two communicate using just the first letter of each word they want to say. “He wrote the initial letters, w, y, a, m, t, c, b, d, t, m, n, o, t,” and Kitty understands intuitively that Levin is asking her. “When you answered me, ‘that cannot be,’ did you mean never or then?” Only t, only “then” it turns out, to Levin’s great happiness. In Creating Anna Karenina, Robert Blaisdell does not make this connection between Tolstoy’s work on the alphabet book and this scene from the novel, but it is the type of parallelism between the great Russian author’s life and art that interests him.
There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor