Page 109 - A Little Life: A Novel

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.