Darling, I stop for a moment the reading of the Young Girls in Bloom which took up my whole afternoon, to come and complain a little in your arms - Cabris’ letter carrier is being too mean to me and I am beginning to find that there are too many Sundays in the week. Unfortunately, these days of famine present themselves, of course, at the time when I am most hungry and I begin to wonder if the order having been changed I would find a morning in the week when I feel satiated enough not to have the physical need for a letter from you.
So, I try to resign myself and continue to wait a little more in the wave than I do when your well known and well hoped for words come to me at each awakening to bring me a bit of your real life, of our real existence so far away already that it sometimes seems almost unimaginable to me. This, of course, to a certain extent! This morning, I stayed in bed until 1 o'clock. I opened the door and let myself daydream a bit bitterly - I had had a bad night - about absence and its “inevitable” consequences. I wondered if you were not tired of all this profusion of words that we are obliged to put between us and that after a while end up in the end by tiring the writer, thus removing the desire to write them.
So I began to judge for myself and when I thought about some of my letters written in the evening, in tiredness, in boredom, in emptiness, in a kind of unreality, with the only goal of telling you that I need your presence and to let you guess that your presence alone would bring me the energy necessary to write this need of yours, at that time I decided again, as I did before your departure, to send you two or three letters a week - short accounts of my days - and to demand only two or three from you as well.
But that’s it! Since then, the hours have passed and despite all my inner struggles to refrain from coming to tell you words, words, words, I succumbed to the idea of going to the end of the day without having answered, at least to me, to your silence and especially to the thought that your Friday would be detached from me. But I am confused. The influence of Proust is beginning to weigh on me and I can no longer dream quietly in my bed, without seeing the images of him enclosed in bouquets of flowers in the curtain of my room. It’s so awesome! ah! my love.
Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, February 1, 1950 [#162]
[…] For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. […]
— William Wordsworth, excerpt of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” from Lyrical Ballads
It’s easy for Wagner-haters to deal with his legacy: reject the work,
reject the man. And it’s easy for bigots: reject the oversensitive
critics’ concerns, for the sake of the art. But after several decades in
which the Festival has led the way in its own evisceration, many
Wagnerians are Just So Over The Nazi Thing.
Some people fall over themselves to get their references to the
anti-Semitism up front and out of the way, so they can establish liberal
bona fides, before moving on to the stuff that really matters. It’s a rhetorical reversal of Godwin’s Law: Why, of course Bayreuth was manipulated by the Nazis! But it was Winifred’s doing—she wasn’t a Wagner by blood—and
Richard Wagner was dead long before the 1930s, so it wasn’t his fault.
Why, of course Wagner wrote propaganda on tropes that were still current
at the time of Kristallnacht—but the music is pure, the actual notes can’t be anti-Semitic. Why, uh, well, of course the actual notes in “Parsifal”include
Christian devotional motifs to underscore the anti-Semitic themes of
Jewish blood impurity and the Wandering Jew…but but but….
I’m disturbed by Slavoj Žižek’s “Why is Wagner Worth Saving,” a 2005 foreword to Theodor Adorno’s In Search of Wagner (1952), in
which he declares that critiques of anti-Semitic representations in the
operas are wrongheaded and superficial, because they fail to decode the
real question of how the “‘Jew’ itself” is simply a cipher for
the “‘original’ social antagonism” of “the most elementary disgust,
repulsion felt by the ego when confronted with the intruding foreign
body.” It’s like he’s never heard that scapegoats get killed.
I’m disturbed by a piece in TheGuardian that bemoans
the archive disclosures. “The danger of Bayreuth publicising its dirty
washing like this is that the link between Wagner and Hitler turns the
place into a sort of self-flagellating Nazi theme park, as if Nazism
were the only prism through which to interpret Wagner’s music.”
I’m disturbed by the New York Times article that aspires to
compare Wagner’s legacy to the 2017 violence in Charlottesville,
Virginia, only to backpedal: “The disturbing events of the outside world
largely faded for me, though, once I entered the theater.”
If writers for The Guardian think Bayreuth’s acts of accountability trivialize its institutional gravity—if Times reporters
sit in the theater where Hitler sat and magically forget, here of all
places, that neo-Nazis are murdering people in the United States and
Germany—then maybe, for them, the Festival is an amusement park, brainwashing them into insouciance about crimes against humanity.
