Musicon / Music and Literature / Learning to laugh
-Learning to laugh
“Harry,” said he, “you’re a great joker. Had this beautiful girl really nothing to desire of you but the stab of a knife? Keep that for someone else! Well, at least you have stabbed her properly. The poor child is stone dead. And now perhaps would be an opportune moment to realize the consequences of your gallantry towards this lady. Or do you think of evading the consequences?”
“No,” I cried. “Don’t you understand at all? I evade the consequences? I have no other desire than to pay and pay and pay for them, to lay my head beneath the axe and pay the penalty of annihilation.”
Mozart looked at me with intolerable mockery.
“How pathetic you always are. But you will learn humor yet, Harry. Humor is always gallows-humor, and it is on the gallows you are now constrained to learn it. You are ready? Good. Then off with you to the public prosecutor and let the law take its course with you till your head is coolly hacked off at break of dawn in the prison yard. You are ready for it?”
……..
When I came to myself again, Mozart was sitting beside me as before. He clapped me on the shoulder and said: “You have heard your sentence. So, you see, you will have to learn to listen to more of the radio music of life. It’ll do you good. You are uncommonly poor in gifts, a poor blockhead, but by degrees you will come to grasp what is required of you. You have got to learn to laugh. That will be required of you. You must apprehend the humor of life, its gallows-humor. But of course you are ready for everything in the world except what will be required of you. You are ready to stab girls to death. You are ready to be executed with all solemnity. You would be ready, no doubt, to mortify and scourge yourself for centuries together. Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, ready with all my heart,” I cried in my misery.
“Of course! When it’s a question of anything stupid and pathetic and devoid of humor or wit, you’re the man, you tragedian. Well, I am not. I don’t care a fig for all your romantics of atonement. You wanted to be executed and to have your head chopped off, you lunatic! For this imbecile ideal you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. The devil, but you shall live! It would serve you right if you were condemned to the severest of penalties.”
“Oh, and what would that be?”
“We might, for example, restore this girl to life again and marry you to her.”
“No, I should not be ready for that. It would bring unhappiness.”
“As if there were not enough unhappiness in all you have designed already! However, enough of pathos and death-dealing. It is time to come to your senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you”.–
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