Finished reading: The Last Movement by Robert Seethaler 📚

Similar to other books I’ve read this year, the story of life is shared via memory as the protagonist remains rooted in one moment of transition.

Everything was only ever getting there. Himself above all. Working meant reworking.

The creative spirit they were always talking about at the Opera and in Viennese artistic circles usually turned out to be just a whisperer of mistaken concepts and misguided ideas…
You had to listen to things, then sit down on your backside and work: that was the whole secret.

You play a note, and it continues to vibrate in the room. Yet it already contains its own end.

Not all traditions—which were really no more than the expression of a steadfast determination to remain eternally the same, lifeless and dull-could simply be swept aside. Time-honored customs had powerful guardians, and they were everywhere.

since music itself transcended all imagination a priori. Music surpassed all human beings, and essentially needed neither musicians nor an audience. Music needed nothing and nobody: it was simply there.

Nothing in this world lasts for ever. Nothing under the sun remains unseen.

Life was little more than a brief exhalation, a breath in the storm of the world, yet he loved it so much that his sadness at the futility of this love almost broke his heart.

Everything was full of life. Even death was a concept of the living. As long as you could still imagine it, it hadn’t arrived.

You can’t rely on anything in this world, he thought. Least of all yourself.