on abandoning after years the settled, safe but what I had come to be feel was shallow life of California -- a kind of pleasant "inner desert" -- to come "one way" to Russia in '94, the move left me in a kind of mourning despair, and the first year through the cold Moscow winter was among the "darkest" in my life. rationing. disorder. uncertainty. ...
somehow -- was it on the fuzzy SW radio or at the Conservatory? -- I heard the second movement of Vivaldi's concert for 2 violins in A minor, and its principle theme was immediately consoling in an inexplicable but unquestionable way.
during the first year especially, I would very often walk around the snow-covered empty streets and paths of the hospital where Dostoyesky had lived as a child, and -- most times, but not always, being able to call the theme up inside -- inwardly or actually hum this theme...again and again and again... and this for days, for months...
letters from Havel, Solzhenitsyn and Page Smith had helped...but there was nothing in word, book or church which aided me like those notes.
and I listened to it inwardly, or voiced it, over the subsequent years when need came.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1k_yexUE6s (second movement: 3:54-7:24)
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