Free Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Page B

position at once higher, dominating, universal, or, as he expressed it, “the true.” It was a genuine pleasure to hear him describe anything as “the true,” it was an anchor, a hold, not quite in vain did one inquire about “the main thing.”
    “You are a lout,” he said, “not to like it. To look at the relations between things must be the best thing, after all. Order is everything. Romans xiii: ‘For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.’” He reddened, and I looked at him large-eyed. It turned out that he was religious.
    With him everything had first to “turn out,” one had to take him by surprise, catch him in the act, get behind the words; then he would go red, and one would have liked to kick oneself for not having seen it before. He went further than necessary in his algebra, played with the logarithmic tables for sheer amusement, sat over equations of the second class before he had been asked to identify unknown quantities raised to a higher power. I caught him at all that by mere chance, and even then he spoke mockingly of them before he made the above admissions. Another discovery, not to say unmasking, had preceded this: I have already mentioned his self-taught and secret exploration of the keyboard, the chord, the compass of tonality, the cycle of fifths, and how he, without knowledge of notes or fingering, used this harmonic basis to practise all sorts of modulations and to build up melodic pictures rhythmically undefined. When I discovered all this, he was in his fifteenth year. I had sought him in vain one afternoon in his room, and found him before a little harmonium which stood rather unregarded in the corridor of the family rooms. For a moment I had listened, standing at the door, but not quite liking this I went forward and asked him what he was doing. He let the bellows rest, took his hands from the manuals, blushed and laughed. “Idleness,” he said, “is the mother of all vice. I was bored. When I am bored I sometimes poke about down here. The old treadle-box stands here pretty forlorn; but for all its simpleness it has the meat of the matter in it. Look, it is curious—that is, of course, there is nothing curious about it, but when you make it out the first time for yourself it is curious how it all hangs together and leads round in a circle.”
    And he played a chord: all black keys, F sharp, A sharp, C sharp, added an E, and so unmasked the chord, which had looked like F-sharp major, as belonging to B major, as its dominant. “Such a chord,” he said, “has of itself no tonality. Everything is relation, and the relation forms the circle.” The A, which, forcing the resolution into G sharp, leads over from B major to E major, led him on, and so via the keys of A, D, and G he came to C major and to the flat keys, as he demonstrated to me that on each one of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale one could build a fresh major or minor scale.
    “But all that is an old story,” he said. “That struck me a long time ago. Now look how you can improve on it!” And he began to show me modulations between more distant keys, by using the so-called relation of the third, the Neapolitan sixth.
    Not that he would have known how to name these things; but he repeated: “Relationship is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is ambiguity.” To illustrate the meaning of the word, he played me chord-progressions belonging to no definite key; demonstrated for me how such a progression fluctuates between C major and G major, if one leaves out the F, that in G major turns into F sharp; how it keeps the ear uncertain as to whether that progression is to be understood as belonging to C major or F major if one avoids the B, which in F major is flattened to B flat.
    “You know what I find?” he asked. “That music turns the equivocal into a system. Take this or that note. You can understand it so or respectively so. You can think of it