Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The professor laughed as he spoke.

Such ratifications as the professor’s, they came later. Until, little by little, experience taught me otherwise, self-doubt permitted no judgment about great art, great music, and such things. If I was right and the young woman’s music was indeed lifeless — if I was right, I wondered, can she herself not hear that her playing is lifeless? It seemed to me an unbearable state to play the violin that way, without emotion, without love and joy.

Maybe they cannot play with emotion, I suggested to Zafar.

But there’s a simpler explanation still, which was: What the hell did I know? The wisdom of that German composer, the ratifying, the borrowed confidence, came only years later. What right, I thought, had I to have an opinion about this musical performance, to think it anything less than accomplished? It’s their music, not mine, and they know what’s what. I’d never touched a violin or piano, let alone learned to play either. It seemed an altogether neater explanation. I was ignorant and presumptuous and they weren’t.

Explanation of what?

My doubts about my judgment. My doubts weren’t really about the quality of her playing, not even at root about whether I was capable of forming a judgment — anyone can have a gut reaction, which may be as real as it gets — but my doubts were about whether I had a right. Who was I to think I knew good from bad?

Aren’t you overthinking it? She’d learned how to play an instrument with skill but not how to play music with emotion, I said, rather pleased with my formulation.

But wouldn’t you want to learn?

Maybe she can’t. Maybe her emotions are hidden from her.

She stopped playing, said Zafar, the moment the rest of the ensemble, arriving as a group, entered the hall. I stayed while they rehearsed the Schubert string quintet. I have to say, I couldn’t focus my listening; I was preoccupied.

At the end, after all the others packed away their instruments and went, the ensemble’s leader and the young woman were left.

The leader of the ensemble, its first violin, was a tall, thin man, evidently several years older than the others. I supposed he was either a graduate student or a junior fellow. He spoke with an uncertain note in his voice.

Emily, he said, you play very well.

Thank you, she replied.

Those are the first two words I ever heard her say. Thank you. They are terms of politeness. But in all the time I was with Emily, I don’t think I ever heard her say sorry. It bothers me, this does. I can’t even think up the image of her doing so, the sound of her voice making that word. It is easy enough, don’t you think, to imagine someone you know well saying words you imagine them saying. But why can’t I imagine her saying that word, just saying sorry ?

For a long time, I wondered if it was my own mind somehow suppressing every memory of her saying sorry , whether in fact she had said sorry but the apologies themselves had so wounded me that my mind had pushed them beyond the reach of the remembering self — an apology is, after all, an acknowledgment of a harm done.

Do you really doubt your judgment so much? I asked Zafar.

Not anymore. I did then, and that’s the nub of it: the disaster it all wreaked not on my judgment but on my ability to rely on my judgment. I lost my bearings.

You were saying—

Yes. I had the impression the ensemble’s leader was considering his words.

You’re a very skillful violinist, he said, which puts you in a position to develop certain aspects of your playing others would have difficulty with.

Emily gave no response.

Yes, well, he continued, it might be useful to develop your expressive voice. Obviously this is something longer term. We’ll be great for tomorrow.

As the young man spoke, Emily was entirely silent and perfectly still. It was impossible, for me at least, to discern her reaction, if there was any. The young man seemed increasingly awkward, and I thought of an adolescent shuffling his feet in embarrassment. Had there been a stone on the floor, he might idly have kicked it.

If you don’t have plans this evening, we could talk about this over a quick supper.

The young woman smiled at him.

That would be nice, she replied.

* * *

Zafar’s account left me with questions. I wanted, for instance, to ask him if he’d ever mentioned that evening to Emily when he met her years later, when he and Emily were seeing each other. As it turned out, he would later address this himself. Our conversation had brought us past the midnight mark, and I saw in his face that my friend was overcome with tiredness. Nevertheless, I could not but ask him, if only for a stopgap until a full answer came, about that parenthetical remark, that he had finally turned to religion when he needed urgent help. What had prompted his appeal to religion? But his answer only raised in my mind more questions, which would have to wait.

Religious conversion, said my friend, is an act of destruction. Turning to God can save your life, but, in the process, it can annihilate your soul.

He rose from his seat and, wishing me a good night, he pulled the study door shut behind him. Left to my own devices, I faced the melancholy in the room, and I asked myself if it was his or mine.

In 1896, from his observatory in Arizona, Percival Lowell discovered a pattern of scarring on the surface of Venus. The arrangement of lines resembled the spokes of a wheel radiating from a hub. Lowell believed he saw features of the terrain, “rock or sand weathered by aeons of exposure to the Sun.” The spokes appeared “with a definiteness to convince the beholder of an objectiveness beyond the possibility of illusion.” His research, including his findings of canals on Mars, fired the imagination of a generation. H. G. Wells cited Lowell’s work as inspiration for The War of the Worlds .

Yet Lowell was alone in seeing these strange markings and, in time, with more advanced telescopes, his claims were discredited. But what did Lowell see? The problem was resolved a century later when an optometrist and amateur astronomer pointed out that Lowell had “stopped down” his telescope — reduced the exit aperture — to the point of unwittingly turning it into an ophthalmoscope. What Lowell actually saw was the network of blood vessels on his retina. Believing he’d found evidence that man was not alone, Percival Lowell had in fact been gazing into his own eye.