The Kreutzer Sonata

This first morning of the new year broke so brightly there was really no choice about what to listen to as I prepared the first cups of coffee- Furtwangler's 1951 recording of Beethoven's 9th from Bayreuth. It's turned out to be an all-Beethoven morning- next was Solti with CSO for the 6th & the 8th, and now, as I procrastinate a bit longer before making steak and eggs for breakfast, the third piano concerto is on the stereo. The steak is leftover from last night, which was spent listening to perhaps 100 songs from the past 50 years during a long, relaxed, home-made dinner.

2011, which I've decided to call "the year of living perilously," needed to expire on a quiet note.

I'm not one for making resolutions, because I resolutely fail at keeping them, but the holidays and the end of a year are always a time of involuntary reflection for me- and in the case of this past year I had almost too much to look back on and attempt to make sense of. In the end I couldn't, and as I told Isabella last night, though in a slightly different context, "there may be no resolution to be had." Like the ending of James' The Ambassadors, there's little more to say than "Then there we are!"- with no one in the story of the last twelve months arriving at a destination they could have foreseen, though for anyone viewing it from a distance, the denouement was likely the only one possible.

But here we are, indeed. The ships have been burned and there's nowhere to go but forward, wherever that is. For me, that doesn't necessarily mean ahead to a particular destination because I have a strong desire to go back to a time when things were simpler- a time when I used to wake up with a clear mind, make myself some coffee, and listen to some Beethoven to begin the day.