Winter Journey (D.911): My selection of soundtrack for The Secret History (Chapter 1- 4) by Donna Tartt

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I am in the chapter 5 of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The privileged, well-educated and moral-degraded college kids are getting more horrible page by page. I have only read 1/3 of the book, it is still too early to say anything definitive about the book. One thing for sure, Donna Tartt is an extraordinary skillful story-teller.

Her marvelous scenery description is harmonized with the emotion and the character of each protagonist, at the same time, hinting to what is to come, with beautiful words. At times, Schubert’s Winter Journey (Winterreise D. 911) was ringing in my brain when reading certain passages.

A stranger I came,
A stranger I depart.
Winterreise 1. Gute Nacht / Good Night

Like a dark cloud
Drifting across clear skies,
When a faint breeze
Stirs through the fir-tops:
I go on my way,
With dragging steps,
Through life’s bright joys,
Alone and ignored.
Winterreise 12. Einsamkeit / Loneliness

“It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjoined fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation over-heard, I felt old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever.

I became expert at making myself invisible.” (pg. 130)

Ah, any man as wretched as I
Gladly yields to such garish guile,
That shows him beyond ice and night and terror
A bright warm house,
And a loving soul within-
Delusion is all I profit from!
Winterreise 19. Täuschung / Delusion

“The moon came out from behind a cloud and I saw the house. It was tremendous. (…)
The entrance hall had a sweet, musty smell and was so dim it seemed almost gaslit; the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings, so high they made my head reel, loomed distorted traces of our own shadows. Someone in the back of the house was playing the piano. (…)
In the back of the room (the library) was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier – dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading – sparkled in the dim.” (pg. 84, 85)

“I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our face luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.” (pg. 99)

What foolish desire
Drives me into the wilderness?
Winterreise 20. Der Wegweiser / The Signpost

“Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle on a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” (pg. 5)

My journey has brought me
To a graveyard.
Here, I thought, is where
I shall rest for the night.
…
I am weary, ready to sink,
Wounded unto death.
Winterreise 21. Das Wirtshaus / The Inn

“My life, which before had been only solitary and miserable, became unbearable. Every day, in a daze, I walked to and from work, sometimes during weather that was ten or twenty below, sometimes during storm so heavy that all I could see was white, and the only way I made it home at all was by keeping close to the guard rail on the side of the road. Once home, I wrapped myself in my dirty blankets and fell on the floor like a dead man. (…) One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.” (pg. 131 – 132)

Winterreise Text: Wilhelm Müller.
English Translation: From a CD booklet.

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