Page 109 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 109

in Harold’s office and been overheard? Or sometimes he sang in the law
                library, when he was re-shelving books late at night and the space was as
                quiet and still as a church—had someone overheard him there?

                   “Sing me something,” said the judge.
                   “What would you like to hear, sir?” he asked. Normally, he would have
                been much more nervous, but he had heard that the judge would make him
                do  a  performance  of  some  sort  (legend  had  it  that  he’d  made  a  previous
                applicant juggle), and Sullivan was a known opera lover.
                   The judge put his fat fingers to his fat lips and thought. “Hmm,” he said.
                “Sing me something that tells me something about you.”

                   He thought, and then sang. He was surprised to hear what he chose—
                Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—both because he didn’t
                even really like Mahler that much and because the lied was a difficult one to
                perform, slow and mournful and subtle and not meant for a tenor. And yet
                he liked the poem itself, which his voice teacher in college had dismissed as
                “second-rate  romanticism,”  but  which  he  had  always  thought  suffered

                unfairly from a poor translation. The standard interpretation of the first line
                was “I am lost to the world,” but he read it as “I have become lost to the
                world,” which, he believed, was  less self-pitying, less melodramatic, and
                more resigned, more confused. I have become lost to the world / In which I
                otherwise  wasted  so  much  time.  The  lied  was  about  the  life  of  an  artist,
                which  he  was  definitely  not.  But  he  understood,  primally  almost,  the
                concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the world, of disappearing into a

                different place, one of retreat and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape
                and discovery. It means nothing to me / Whether the world believes me dead
                / I can hardly say anything to refute it / For truly, I am no longer a part of
                the world.
                   When he finished, he opened his eyes to the judge clapping and laughing.
                “Bravo,” he said. “Bravo! But I think you might be in the wrong profession

                altogether, you know.” He laughed again. “Where’d you learn to sing like
                that?”
                   “The brothers, sir,” he’d replied.
                   “Ah, a Catholic boy?” asked the judge, sitting up fatly in his chair and
                looking ready to be pleased.
                   “I was raised Catholic,” he began.
                   “But you’re not now?” the judge asked, frowning.
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