TRUDGING back up the steps to the house, Matthew wonders whether those radio quizzes still exist. He hasn’t heard one in years. Perhaps he would if he listened to talk radio or rock ’n’ roll stations, but he doesn’t listen to that sort of thing much anymore. He does listen to rock music now and then, but he can’t enjoy listening to it for any length of time; the oldies make him feel old, and the new stuff makes him feel silly. Usually he starts the day with a dose of public-radio news, and then he listens to the first hour of a classical music program before he leaves for the office. He used to regret that he didn’t have time to listen to the whole program, which continues until noon, but then on a holiday he listened all the way through and found that with each succeeding hour the music was less and less to his liking — the crisp architecture of Bach, the mathematician’s favorite, gave way little by little to things looser and, it seemed, nastier; Bach soothes him, Beethoven worries him, Shostakovich terrifies him. By the final hour, the show seemed to Matthew to have become a hodgepodge of clangorous anger and self-serving interviews that he neither understood nor liked. This discovery that the program wasn’t all Bach led Matthew to the realization that for most of his life he had thought that he was missing something, in the sense that what he was missing was better than what he had. Now he was confronted with the possibility that that assumption was entirely wrong. Perhaps there was no reason to feel that he was missing something better than what he had, no reason at all. Perhaps what he was missing was in fact worse than what he was getting, nothing but the various equivalents of jangling music and carping braggarts. There was certainly no reason to covet that. What a liberating idea this was at first, but, after a little time and thought, what a depressing idea it became. If what he was getting was the best there was, and it seemed none too good, then what was the basis for hope? It is a curse of the mind inclined to sadness that, given time, it will find the rotten spot in even the ripest, most promising idea.
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