Sometimes we meet at junctions in the road, and we stop to look back on the road travelled. Someone once described to me life like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. As time goes by, we become more and more entrenched in our lives and it becomes harder to change, much easier just to accept what is.
Yesterday I was with my trainer, Les, he’s edging on 80 but still starts his morning with 500 push ups. When I am on the ground and I can’t get more out of my core, he kicks me. I kind of like that. In an age when everyone is so precious, it’s nice to pay someone to kick you when you are down.
In order to attempt more stamina and to build to a sort of crescendo of exercise I decided to play Boléro on my speaker but despite it motivating me, it took me back to a place I had forgotten.
It was a wet summer and in December I drove down towards Tumbarumba, a place that’s name means “walking on hollow ground”. It is about 6 hours from Sydney heading south and sits at the foothills of the Snow Mountains. To get there you go through the most famous Australian town for apples, Batlow. It was a cold summer’s night, and the country was green from a wet summer. A full moon had bathed the landscape silver, glimpsed between the trees and at certain vistas along the way, shining light bouncing off the white sails that protected the apple orchards. I had a cigarette out the window of my Audi 80 and Ravel’s Boléro blaring through the speakers. I was on my own and could not be happier. I was an agricultural economist in the second last year of my degree.
That summer I was on my own for most of it. Other kids were off having the time of their lives, but I had to get through three to four months of working on farms in order to earn my degree. But it wasn’t the work that motivated me that summer, it was the times I spent on my own in the house I occupied. I had a car full of books and of music and a journal in which to write and for that wet summer, on my own every night, I think for the first time I fell in love with my own company. I would drink red wine on my own at night, listen to a live recording of Bob Dylan, classical music, Fleetwood Mac, Dire Straits, the Beatles. I would read Tolstoy and Hemingway and the like. I think perhaps now looking back it was probably a little cliché. But as a young person discovering these things with time on your side it was such a wonderful pleasure. And then there was the classical music, again, probably cliches, but the most prominent of them would be Chopin’s Nocturnes, Tchaikovsky, Lakme’s Flower Duet and of course Ravel’s Bolero. A handful of classical music CD’s that I would play over and over with nothing much else to do after a day on the land.
I almost don’t remember the work. There was pruning that summer from memory. And grafting. I did not care for the work but in that way that Tolstoy glorified country life, I came to see it as a sort of idyll even if the human stories you heard and the characters you met did not stand up to that image, some of them more Dostoyevsky than Tolstoy.
And I wrote. And I had such strong and powerful dreams that cold wet summer. And I wrote.
Music and perfume. They are such strong ways of conjuring memory.
All it took to recall the flyfishing, pruning the vines, the sound of the farm manager shooting at birds on the dam in the late afternoon, the tractors, the tool shed, those drives at night on the country road, ranging from silver in the moon to complete darkness when there wasn’t one. The stars, the furnace fire drying your wet socks – all of it from hearing Boléro again. A young man with ideas and time on his hand.
My father turned 80 last Sunday. Not long ago he was talking to me one morning and he said “I can recall lying in my bedroom as a young boy, I used to read Greek mythology and ancient Greek history and when I stared at a certain bit of plaster on the wall, I could make out warriors and the battles as if I was there. And if I think hard enough, I can still see myself right there in my bedroom. It feels so clear to me.” In a small moment that little boy was now 80. He was thinking of his life lived, his choices. He had led what I believe is a good life. Certainly, more wholesome than my own. A product of post WW2. He had done very well in life, but regardless, he was old now, the bulk of his life behind him.
At a cemetery in La Perouse some years earlier my brother and I had walked around mid-winter with my late grandmother. As she walked down one of the pathways, she pointed to either side of the row and told us who they were to her – her uncle, her mother, brothers, her cousins. All gone. It was a cold day etched in my memory. She passed a few years later.
The Boléro is my most favoured work of Maurice Ravel thought Pavane For A Dead Princess is a close second. Boléro reminds me of life, it is the building of a crescendo, from the soft beginnings of a snare drum which in life are infancy and the child developing, to the transfer of the melody that began in childhood moving beginning to change, passing over to the flute, the clarinet, the oboe and finally onto brass. The is the ingenious composition that seems simple, but is in parts rather complex – a wonderful metaphor for life itself. The heartbeat stays with the composition throughout, like the heartbeat that and pulse we keep ourselves. It keeps us focused and engaged, we are alive, we are moving through time. And like life, we build slowly and with gaining intensity and tensions to crescendo of our lives before a climax and then, finally, the closing of the curtains.
And so, as I listened to it again and again yesterday as I went about my business, I conjured up all that had passed, all that I might have been had I taken a different direction. Had I married that wonderful Danish girlfriend I had, had I struck up a conversation with that ginger beauty at the local supermarket in Tumbarumba that wet summer, had gone onto trade derivatives in commodities as an agricultural economist, had I taken any other path other than the one I chose.
So today I simply want to ask you, have you ever thought about another life you might have led? And perhaps whilst you ponder on it, play Ravel’s Boléro.
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