Avoid all that which would ask you not to think

It only took me four iterations before I was able to start building the accompaniment for MELISANDE's big exponential growth number. What I ended up doing was asking myself what, precisely, needed to be communicated subtextually in every single measure. This got me through the introduction, which is largely recitative, and once we got into the big part of the number, which requires a kind of boom-chuck, I took that figure I'd been thinking about for twenty years (the one I originally put into my draft of Pericles, to underscore the fifteen-year time jump as Gower and the chorus explain what happens to Marina [which would have been the big number that opened Act II]) and asked myself what I had learned since I first wrote that figure, and then I expanded it into something that bears just a tick of resemblance to the original.

Which is all very well and good, I tell you.

I also have an answer to the question I asked yesterday, which was why Lydgate allows himself to be captivated/captured by Rosamond, and if I had read just a few more pages before writing yesterday's post I would have been able to tell you then, but in many ways it's better for me to tell you now –

it's because Lydgate doesn't think about anything beyond his work.

I mean this in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. Lydgate, as Eliot explains, is extremely learned in terms of medicine and extremely disciplined in both his process and his practice – but afterwards, when he's done with his work (and, more specifically, done with thought), he indulges in popular music and melodrama.

Because of this, Lydgate develops shallow, common ideas about the nature of human relationships, including the idea that love derives from passion rather than insight.

As soon as I read this I asked Larry whether a person had to study the best of everything – that was how I put it, the best of everything – in order to avoid similar errors in thought. He and I are reasonably polymathic, and have been continually working our way towards a closer understanding of the varying levels of quality in our disciplines (if we believe Brahms to be a better composer than Schumann and Ravel to be a better composer than Debussy, we must clearly articulate why), and part of what we discussed last night had to do with the disciplines we might be missing. Neither of us have ever learned calculus, for example, nor do we seriously anticipate learning it this year (in part because we are putting so much energy towards Brahms and Ravel).

But one might be able to get around the necessity of becoming an omnimath by following one simple rule –

avoid all that which would ask you not to think.

This starts with artificial intelligence, because I share Paul Graham's prediction that it will turn us first into a world of writes and write-nots and then, because writing is organized thought, into thinks and think-nots.

It continues into other artificial forms of media. My Old Ass and all of those Netflix Originals where the characters repeat the plot every two minutes and any book that is described in terms of vibes.

I suspect it includes both Substack and X, and for good gravy's sake stop referring to those places as the bazaar and the agora, they are pay-to-play-to-get-paid systems, don't you remember when Forbes and then Medium did the pay-by-clicks-or-claps thing (the "Forbes Contributor" lol), all SubstX did was add a parasocial signaling factor in which you give them money to advertise the people you want other people to believe you read.

And yes, I know, you think when you post, or at least you think you think when you post, but so much of what I see from the output end is melodrama, that which appeals to the emotions.

Which brings us back to Lydgate and his reaction when he hears real music for what may in fact be the first time (Eliot writes that men like Lydgate rarely go "beyond Offenbach," which is a hilarious detail). It also brings us to his biggest cognitive error:

Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon’s school (close to a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of musical celebrity. Rosamond, with the executant’s instinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond’s fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter. Lydgate was taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something exceptional.

Lydgate correctly hears the composer's soul through the music, as all productive work is a demonstration of the mind of its maker –

but he incorrectly mistakes that soul for Rosamond's.

More on all of this tomorrow, including how Lydgate's bifurcated mind affects his relationship with Mr. Bulstrode.