Remember Me by David Stacton Read Free Book Online

Master’s operas.
    In the distance rose the Alps. Across the water glimmered little lights. It was a moving moment, and he was glad he was alone. As a captive child he had looked across this water to Possenhofen. It was in the library there that he had first come across the works of the Master. Now, in another villa across the lake, the Master was near him. Somewhere across the lake he was thinking, creating, indestructible and pure. Ludwig was his inspiration.
    Suddenly the lights of Wagner’s villa twinkled and guttered out. The sky seemed to lighten by contrast. The night was cold. Ludwig shivered. Something seemed to have happened to his happiness. Release he must have of some kind, or else explode. By now he knew what form that release would take, and though he hated it, have it he must. It was too hard to wait for Lohengrin.
    He turned and strode swiftly towards the stables, forby accident he had climbed on the wave of his own lower sensations, and felt himself driving in towards shore, helpless to avert the shattering of the crest. It was at such moments that he went mad and loathed himself profoundly . Each time he did this sort of thing he vitiated the bottled-up energy that he needed to drive him higher and higher, until at last he might burst out into the milky-white meadows of the mind where the Master was, and freedom from the self as well. Each time he tried to control himself; the tension became too great and he dropped back. Each time the sense of defeat afterwards was more terrible. Servants have more uses than one, but it made him hate the sight of them.
    An hour later, shuffling back to Berg, his big body furtive in the trees, he avoided the look of the lake. He dared not look at it until sleep had renewed him again, otherwise he would spoil everything. The lower desires were abominable. At the time they meant everything. Afterwards they meant the loss of everything. They worked against the Self. And sex is not love. One will never find love down there.
    He entered Berg and slept until afternoon.
    When he woke, it was fearfully, as though he expected to be caught out and punished. But the world had other punishments in store for him. It could wait for a while, so that for once he awoke to a world exactly as he would have wished to see it. While he slept the landscape had come alive, with that dazzling transcendence which overwhelms people when they are exacerbated, or deeply moved.
    He went for a walk. Seedlings swayed between the roots of whole dynasties of trees. He loved the natural world. He could understand the pathos of snow melting drop by drop from the tip of a fir bough, in a way thathe could understand nothing else. Now for a moment the world seemed to return his love. It was a consolation, in a way, for he had begun to realize certain things about the Great Friend.
    Wagner had never seen a tree in his life. Such was the speed of his imagination, such was its haste to arrive at its destination, that whole forests swept by him in a green blur, like a sheet of flames; and when he did reach his destination, which was the last note of the last act of the next work but one, sure enough, there was the green blur, immortal forever as a background to some of the least convincing and most ignoble gods and goddesses who ever peopled a mythology. It was a shame. He missed so much. Ludwig was aware of the dryness of each single constituent leaf in the comity of a tree.
    Where could he ever find love? He had summoned Wagner to find out. But far from giving it, Wagner did not even seem capable of accepting it when it was offered. To Ludwig love was a necessity. To Wagner it was only a convenience. To realize that was very sad.
    Love for the world’s small things is furtive and hides out of sight, peering at infinity through the grasses with nictitating eyes. Of such was Dürer’s world. Of such was his. But Wagner was not like that.
    Ludwig had hoped to find refuge in a work of art. Yet all the things he