Friday, July 07, 2006
Im/perfectI've been re-reading Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami), and this time round, a certain exchange (where Oshima and Kafka discuss Schubert's sonatas) that occurs in the novel hit me unexpectedly hard.
"Because playing Schubert's piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Most of all this Sonata in D Major......because the sonata itself is imperfect. Robert Schumann understood Schubert's sonatas well, and he labelled this one 'Heavenly Tedious'."
"If the composition's imperfect, why would so many pianists try to master it?"
"Good question," Oshima says, and pauses as music fills in the silence. "I have no great explanation for it, but one thing I can say: works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason - or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than fully realised novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart - or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert's Sonata in D Major is like that......a dense, artistic imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D Major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect..."
Because the Perfection doesn't matter; it's the struggle for perfection that makes it count. If one ever
does achieve utter perfection, I think one would like to close his eyes and just die, because everything would simply become meaningless and boring. That said, I still struggle towards 'perfection'; if I didn't, I wouldn't be me. Plus it makes things tough, occupies your mind, and gives life meaning. What more could anyone want? We live to be imperfect.
**dream until you die**12:20 AM
