The hallmark of the movement is, in fact, the wide separation between bass and treble, between the right and left hands, and a moment arrives, a situation of extremes where the poor theme seems to hover lonely and forlorn above a dizzyingly gaping abyss - an event of pallid grandeur, and hard on its heels comes an anxious shrinking-to-almost-nothing, a moment of startled fear, as it were, that such a thing could happen. And a great deal more happens yet before it comes to an end. But when it does end, and in the very act of ending, there comes - after all this fury, tenacity, obsessiveness and extravagance - something fully unexpected and touching in its very mildness and kindness. After all its ordeals, the motif, this D-G-G, undergoes a gentle transformation. As it takes its farewell and becomes in and of itself a farewell, a call and a wave of goodbye, it experiences a little melodic enhancement. After an initial C, it takes on a C-sharp before the D; and this added C-sharp is the most touching, comforting, poignantly forgiving act in the world. It is like a painfully loving caress of the hair, the cheek - a silent, deep gaze into the eyes for one last time. It blesses its object, its dreadful journeys now past, with overwhelming humanization, lays it on the hearer's heart as a farewell, forever, lays it so gently that tears well up. "Now forget the pain!" it says. "God was great in us." "All was but a dream." "Hold my memory dear." Then breaks off.
----------------------------
Science, however, cannot dispense with reason, and the desire to make a science out of our sense of the infinite and its eternal riddle means forcing together two utterly alien spheres in a manner that, in my eyes, is both unfortunate and sure to plunge one into never-ending difficulty. Religious feeling, which I in no way view as foreign to my own heart, is surely something other than a formal and denominationally bound creed. Would it not have been better to have left the human feeling for the infinite to our sense of piety, to the fine arts, to free contemplation, indeed to exact research as well - which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics is quite capable of fostering that same feeling with truly religious reverence for the mystery of creation - instead of making it an exclusive field of learning and developing dogmatic structures, for just one copulative verb of which adherents gladly draw blood?
-Thomas Mann (Doctor Faustus)
