Chapter 1

Who knows why I come here? Shouldn’t I be at home, at the home they both left, in their differing ways? Why come here, when the house is just as silent, when I am just as alone? Why seek another place for the solitude that I have in such abundance just two blocks away?

He lost seven, I tell myself. Johann Sebastian Bach—the greatest composer of any age, including the ages to come—lost seven children and a beloved wife. He carried on—and I?

My days, diary. I wake, generally hungover, between 10 and 11 in the morning, having been up for several hours in the middle of the night. I try to get myself to go out, to take a walk. At times, I make it to the local beach, the Esccambrón, and I loll in the water for a bit—no longer than 15 minutes. I have to force myself to stay any longer: I’m too disciplined to enjoy wasting a day at the beach. I have things to do.

Or did. Because what am I doing now? I’m leaving one empty apartment to come to another empty apartment. Here, I get down to what has become my work—pacing the apartment, as I consider the life of a man dead over 250 years ago. I set myself the task—I will each day listen to one of the 199 sacred cantatas that Bach composed in his life. And at the end of the 199 days?

Will I have healed? Will the memory of the two deaths—one real, one figurative…. No, they were both real. Will they stop, those two deaths, ravaging my nights? For on most nights, I spend my time as Prometheus spent his days—with a giant eagle plucking out my liver.

I drink myself into the next stage of sleep, and lurch myself to the bed. The next day, I go to the apartment—the apartment I bought for rental income, since the interest is nothing nowadays. And then I begin—the pacing, the music, and finally, making the video. It will take my a couple of hours, during which my head will clear, my stomach re-establish itself, my hands stop from shaking.

I’ll go to the café, the place where I met her, and I’ll sit in my chair, with my coffee and with my memories. They know me here, and they know my story as well. So they’ll bring me the Kleenex as automatically as they bring the tuna sandwich I eat every day. And they’ll let me talk, too—about her and about him, and about how I never imagined loss, and how we both were astonished that it was being pulled away from us—our life together. For really, that’s what it was. We had attracted the notice of a vengeful God—a God who despised our happiness, the easiness of our life, the health and the happiness and the security.

Return to the apartment. Write the post. And then, find something for dinner, sit in the chair, divert my mind with Sudoku and rum.  

My day, diary. But is any man able to describe his nights?

Chapter 2

I don’t understand him: he sits for hours at a time in front of his magic book, the metal book that plays for him the music I wrote all those years ago. And they make a fetish of it, those pieces I churned out for the Sunday services in Leipzig. Did anyone listen to them at the time? Probably not: the people drifted in and out of the church, chatting with their neighbors as they went, and never even paying attention to the sermon.

I’ve listened in with him, and the book plays the music beautifully—much better than my own musicians did in my day. But shouldn’t he have something to do? He listens and he writes—is that the work of a man?

You’ll say that I did much the same, when I was in the world—that I woke every morning and sat down to write, but that wasn’t all. I was a workingman, working in my trade as all my family did. We were all musicians, and my son, in fact was for many years more famous than I.

But this man—he paces and stares, sits down to the magic book, mumbles to himself. And his religion, it seems, is my music.

He has no belief—that I know. For all that I’ve seen him weep, I’ve never once seen him pray! And here he is, listening to the cantata that has the words, ”thy word is not upheld as true, and faith is also now quite dead,
among all mankind's children.”

Not in my day. I grew up surrounded by faith—what else did we have? And what luxury and waste this man has—his health, how he assumes that everybody, himself included, is going to be well! Not in Eisenach, where I was born; my parents died within months of each other when I was seven. And death was with us all the time—as much as life.

It’s stale, this world—a world that only has life, that has no sickness, no death, no darkness. And no God—who could live such a life? Without a God, where is your soul? And what do you turn to, when you wife or your child dies?

I buried seven, and a beloved wife as well. And this man? He is weeping for one child and the man he “loved?” Yes, we knew of this, this evil that everyone now takes for granted. A man lying with a man? An abomination, says the Bible. But who has time, now to read the Bible? Or even interest….

Curious about time—how little and yet how much of it we had. His magic book does so much for him, and imprisons him as well. He can go nowhere without it, and when he sees his friends, they sit with their books on their laps. In my day we talked, we smoked our pipes and drank and told stories. But for all the time he has, he doesn’t seem to have any at all. He’s in a rush and he does nothing!

Nothing but sit and cry, listen to my music, pace, stare in the mirror, and write into his book. My God, man—to work!