## Metadata - Author: [[Christopher Priest]] - Full Title: The Gradual - Category: #books ## Highlights - How profoundly I wished to return to the sea! To the islands, to the dreams they contained, perhaps to vanish forever into the vague tides of distorted time, days and weeks gained, or days and weeks forever lost. ([Location 1637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=1637)) - The piece of music you are being commissioned to write must be wholeheartedly patriotic. You are expected to write it from the heart. We have no wish to hear –’ and unexpectedly she pulled from her breast pocket a slip of paper, and read aloud from it ‘– we do not want irony, subversion, subtlety, cryptic statements, cross-references, allusions, knowing asides, quotations, hidden meanings. Is that clear?’ ([Location 1870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=1870)) - Where once before I would have sought discordance, challenge and surprise in the music that I dreamed about, now I whistled tunes quietly to myself, tapped my foot as a rhythm came to me. I would stand close to the prow of every boat, responding to the slow rise and fall as we moved across the swell. Much of the time I had my eyes closed as I reacted to the sounds in my mind, or I stared away across the water to the nearest island, not focusing, just looking. Passengers on passing ships waved across intersecting wakes – soon I became one of them, joining in and waving back, loving this marine adventure, this journey into unknown zones, not only of the vast, island-crammed ocean, but also into the new musical impulses, lighter, happier, that were rising from my soul. ([Location 2184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=2184)) - I ran in the merciless sunshine, through the hot still air of the country lane, dense with flowers, busy with birds, running until I had to stop at last to collect my breath. ([Location 3257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3257)) - Once again a litany of island names: Foort, the Ferredy Atoll, Mesterline, the Coast of Helvard’s Passion, Lillen-cay, Salay, Fellenstell. They seemed to speed past, even though the ferries followed their usual circuitous routes, made their slow ports of call. I changed from ship to ship. I watched the varying chronometers on the walls of my cabins, absolute time, ship time. I met with the adepts, they adjusted my detriment. My stave became increasingly scored. I stayed in hotels, some humble, some grand, some awful. I burned on sunny decks, I sweated in unventilated cabins. I drank too much alcohol. I was lonely, emotionally drained, undecided about practical things, abandoned by music, beaten by life. I was not attending to what I saw, what I went past, what happened to me. ([Location 3259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3259)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - I travelled only to put distance behind me, to use up the distance that lay ahead. Distance was time: absolute time, my time, ship time. My brother and I were separated by distance, but also by the years lost and gained in repeated detriments, the temporal tides that eroded reality, the gradual encroachment of time. It was difficult to understand rationally – it was impossible to comprehend emotionally. The gradual was a kind of endless, in explicable madness. ([Location 3268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3268)) - At night I dreamed of the islands I had seen and visited, the slow progression of one after another as the ferries ploughed their routes across the calm straits between them, places varied and mysterious, land close at hand but often unattainable, each small island with its invisible, indiscernible power of time distortion. I began to realize that I best understood the effect of the gradual if I interpreted it in musical terms. The Archipelago was in my dreams, and every morning I would rise from my bed and go straight to the piano, trying to capture, define, describe, use the fleeting impressions, the unreliable memories of the music of dreams. ([Location 3831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3831)) - All we had together was an instant of past, and an even shorter present. Could two people’s future be built on such a flimsy basis? ([Location 3969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3969)) - I went down the lane with her and we waited until the taxi arrived. Then she was driven away, a dust cloud thrown up by the car’s tyres from the unmade surface and drifting briefly. I walked back to the house. The day, hardly begun, had already lost its point. ([Location 3971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3971)) - Like a roaring in my mind I heard a great swelling of music – an imagining of complex orchestral music, intriguing, unique, complete. Above all, complete. A whole work. It was over in less than a minute but in that time, in some kind of imaginative shorthand it is impossible to understand or describe, I heard the whole of what would probably be an extended orchestral suite of at least twenty or thirty minutes’ duration. My normal method of composition was a slow and sometimes painful process of seeking notes on the piano, making marks on the manuscript, following an unending series of changes of mind, abandoning and restoring certain phrases – but this piece had come to me entire. ([Location 3980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=3980)) - The music that speaks to us from the islands is not unique, as we believe or as some of us prefer to believe. It is in fact communal, consensus, shared, part of the gradual. It is present in the fields of time that lie around every island. It is the great hall of music, the fundament, the sky, the world. ([Location 4185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=4185)) - I had also discovered that a fragment of the past does not fill the present, nor provide a future. ([Location 4256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CBLR0NA&location=4256))