I went to a little concert alone this evening between 6 and 7. It was Schubert’s Quintet in C Major with two cellos. It is a well known piece; many people’s favourite. I used to listen to this piece many years ago very often, so it brought back memories of that time. The yearning strains of the second movement. How I would have affixed my desires and melancholies of a young man onto this music. The piece this evening acted to reacquaint myself with my younger self. These days there are yearnings, I suppose, but not so much. I don’t function the same way The melancholy now is about the passage of time and the people I used to spend time with, now mostly distant, out of my ambit, for whatever reason. As I was leaving my seat with the rest of the crowd there was an argument going on between two men. As I understood it, one of the men had tapped someone, perhaps the other man, on the shoulder during the music to stop them making a noise of some sort and the other man had taken umbrage at it. For him too, perhaps both of them, this music was some special resonance of their past that must not be interfered with. The music was a vessel that contained the normally unreachable past. The man tapping on the other man’s shoulder had broken the vessel.

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