The Master and Margarita - pg. 383

'And there, too,' Woland pointed behind them, 'what are you going to do in the little basement?' Here the sun broken up in the glass went out. 'Why?' Woland went on persuasively and gently, 'oh, thrice-romantic master, can it be that you don't want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert's music? Can it be that you don't want to sit over a retort like Faust, in hopes that you'll succeed in forming a new homunculus? There! There! The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn. Down this path, master, this one! Farewell! It's time for me to go!'

The Master and Margarita - Opening

BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I

Never Talk With Strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plum, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

'... who are you, then?'
'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'

Goethe, Faust

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group

First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7
This translation published in Penguin Books 1997

Text copyright Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967
Translation, Further Reading and Notes copyright Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997
Introduction copyright Richard Pevear 1997
All rights reserved

Set in 10/12pt Monotype Garamond
Printed in the United States of America

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Opening

1
THE GOLDEN AGE
Strauss, Mahler, and Fin de Siecle

When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and world had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale -- an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.

Part 1
1900-1933

I am ready, I feel free
To cleave the ether on a novel flight,
To novel spheres of pure activity.

-- GOETHE, FAUST, PART 1

THE REST IS NOISE Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175th Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Picadoe is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to repring the following material: Excerpt from "Art for Art's Sake" from The Cradle Will Rock. Used by permission of the Estate of Marc Blitzsen. "Battle Cry" by Milton Babbitt. Used by permission of the author. Excerpt from letter of September 1934 to Israel Citkowitz, by Aaron Copland. Used by permission of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

Designed by Michelle McMillan

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

For my parents
and
Jonathan

It seems to me ... that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliabilist in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.
--Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

HAMLET: ... -- the rest is silence.
HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within]
Why does the drum come hither?

2666 - pg. 683

Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry.The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said  culture was Wagner and that was enoguh for him  too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.

The Ego And His Own - pg. 85

Descarte's dubitaire contains the decided statement
that only cogitare, thought, mind - is. A complete
break with "common" consciousness, which ascribes reality to
irrational things! Only the rational is, only mind is! This
is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian
principle. Descartes in his own time discriminated the body
sharply from the mind, and "the spirit 'tis that builds itself the
body," says Goethe.

Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 109

He says: "If on this earth you want to be, a creature, male and full of glee, be careful and weigh everything, before you let the midwife fling you towards the daylight, there to grow: Earth is a nest of grief and woe. Believe the poet of these verses, who often pines and often curses, while chewing on this iron crust -- quotation pinched from Goethe's Faust: Man only relishes life's glow, in general, as an embryo! ... There is the good old father State, he rags and irks you soon and late. He pricks and pesters you -- you're bled with laws and codes: 'Prohibited!' His first commandment: Man, shell out. His second: Hold your dirty snout. And thus you live in adumbration, your state is that of offuscation. And if you seek to drown your queer, rough anger at some pub with beer, or with some win, respectively, a headache promptly trails the spree. Meanwhile the years knock at the gate, the months erode the hair, elate. Suspiciously the rafters creak, the limbs grow flabby, blighted, weak: gray matter sours in the brain, and thinner grows the good old strain. In short, you see fall coming nigh, you put the spoon down and you die. And now I ask you, friend, a-quiver: just what is man, what is life's river? Did not our great poet Schiller confess: 'It's not the highest men possess'. But I say it's a chicken-ladder at best, up and down and all the rest."

The Savage Detectives - pg. 184

Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, January 1977. There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. Let's take for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you're calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That's how I see it. I hope I am not offending anyone. Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicided after reading Werther. Second: he's a limited reader. Why limited? That's easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who's unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Misérables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they're exhausted! Why? it's obvious! One can't live one's whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly - as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives - he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what's called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damían, and so they didn't listen.

Under The Volcano - pg. 213

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.
"What is it Goethe says about the horse?" he said. " 'Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.' "

Goethe

Whosoever unceasingly strives upward ... him can we save.

Journey To The End Of The Night - pg. 66

Being a soldier for nothing was a new idea. So new that Goethe, in spite of his being Goethe, when he came to Valmy, got a shock at the sight of it. In the presence of those ragged, impassioned troops, who had come there of their own free will to be ripped to pieces by the King of Prussia in defense of this brand-new fiction of patriotism, Goethe felt that he still had a great deal to learn. 'From that day', he proclaimed magnificently, in his own inimitable style, 'a new epoch commences.' I should damn well think it does! After that, as the idea worked so well, they started to turn out heroes in series, and they cost less and less as the system became more and more perfect. Everyone's done the same. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barres, as well as the bold Elsa. Flag worship promptly replaced divine worship, an old cloud already punctured by the Reformation and condensed a long time ago into Episcopal coffers. In the old days the fanatic fashion was 'Jesus for ever!' and 'Burn the heretics!' Still, the heretics after all were rare and of their own choosing. But now, i our time, immense hordes are roused by the cry: ' To the stake with all gutless sissies, fibreless hacks and innocent bookworms. Millions, face right!' Those who do not want to spitcher or assassinate anybody, the stinking pacifists, take, seize and quarter them.