Winterreise

I. Gute Nacht — the setting-out

Three weeks. That is what a winter holiday is meant to be — open time, warm and unhurried, marked only by morning, noon and night, the reward a term of work has earned. But the days had other plans. Mine narrowed into a tunnel: practice, clean, travel, repeat. And the days folded into one another until I could no longer tell where one ended and the next began. Like the traveller who leaves in the dark while the house still sleeps, I set out into the season without quite deciding to.

II. Das Licht durch Glas — the light through glass

There is a lesson hidden in that blurring, though I did not want to learn it. The light came only in glimpses, and always through glass. It transmuted as it passed through the car windows — a lulling warmth that pooled on my lap, or else struck me at the low, oblique angle the earth's tilt lends this season, straight into my eyes, so that I squinted in spite of the sunglasses. Winter in rural New South Wales is generous with its cold and capricious with its light; and when the full, precipitous, tropical clouds of Sydney gave way to the bright, indifferent skies of the highlands, I wondered what such brilliance was for, when it warmed nothing at all. The light I noticed came mostly in transit, or demanded my attention through the shades of my study window while I leaned over other things.

III. Auf der Straße — on the road

The car became a second study. Recordings ran the whole way — not for pleasure but for triage, the urgent passages repeated until the phrasing settled into my hands before I reached a piano again. The road asks a strange, divided attention: one part of you steering, another learning a score, both awake at once. I would not recommend it. But the hours must come from somewhere, and they were not going to come from anywhere kinder.

IV. Die Übung — the practising

And then the practice itself, which gave the tunnel its shape. There is a comfortable myth that musicians spend their holidays making music; the truth is nearer to manual labour, and to prayer. The same four bars, again, until the hand stops its quarrel with them. A passage slowed until it means nothing, then coaxed back toward speed a little at a time, the ear waiting for the precise moment it will break. It is patient, unglamorous, obessively devotional work, and it cares nothing for whether you feel inspired. Some mornings I sat down cold and simply began, trusting the routine to carry what the will could not — and this, I have come to believe, is the secret the practice keeps: that discipline is only love that has learned to show up on the dull or inconvenient days. The reward, when it comes, is quiet. A phrase impossible on Monday is merely difficult by Thursday, and by Sunday I have forgotten it was ever hard. That forgetting is the whole of it. It is also, I suspect, why the days dissolved — each one quietly erasing the evidence of the last.

V. Rast — the halt

The warmth on the long drives forced halfway recharges, and not only the car's. The Geely has generous back seats, wide enough for me to curl around a European-sized cushion while the charger does its drilling work; the flat seats and hidden buckles made a worthier bed than some of the hard floors and dusty mats I have sought out at the end of very long working days. A gluten-free pie waited at Heatherbrae's, deferred while I slept. There is a small and perfect luxury in it — the machine drawing its power from the wall while I drew mine from twenty minutes of engineered stillness in a car park. The pie could wait. My battery could not.

VI. Die Stunde vor Licht — the hour before light

The mornings began early. They always do. And the whole household arranged itself around the single economy still in my hands: the car drinks most cheaply between midnight and six, and so that dark window became the axis on which everything else turned. The dishwasher flicked on at 5am. Devices set to wake in the small hours and labour while the current is cheap; the day quietly bent to take advantage of six hours most people sleep straight through.

VII. Das eine warme Zimmer — the one warm room

Warmth was the other discipline. One room heated — the study — and the rest of the house surrendered to the cold. You rug up, you keep the door shut, you refuse to warm the metres you are not standing in. Written down it sounds like penance. In truth it is only arithmetic: every degree of comfort has its price, and the coins are not endless, and so you learn to want warmth only where you actually are. Perhaps that is a small parable about desire — that it grows lighter once it stops reaching past the room it lives in.

VIII. Das Wirtshaus — the wayside inn

There were, in fairness, a few hours of true rest. A three-course dinner at Mezzalira with a dear friend — an evening that reminds you conversation is itself a kind of nourishment — and the next day a two-hour climb up Mount Ainslie and down again to earn the gluttonous repast of the the previous evening. That was rest of a sort too: the honest fatigue of a body used well rather than merely worn thin.

IX. Die Arbeit — the work of the house

The rest of my exercise came from the work itself, and from whatever I could steal between its demands — a jog when the day allowed, salsa steps copied from a screen late at night, when the mind kept the body from sleep — but mostly the plain labour of setting a house right. Hours head-down, elbows deep in the oven, lifting grease I had loosened overnight with the fumes of cloudy ammonia. Stains drawn from the carpet with a paste. The dormant wisteria swept from where it had shed. And the familiar litany behind it all: watering the plants, dusting, vacuuming, carrying out the bins. Even the cleaners were made by my own hand — the powders for the dishwasher and the washing machine blended from washing soda and citric acid, grated yellow soap, borax and bicarbonate, and then a few drops of bergamot, my favourite, so that the dishes and the linen came out of their ablutions faintly perfumed, redolent of Earl Grey; the carpet shampoo mixed from nothing more than grated soap, warm water and cream of tartar. I will not pretend the self-sufficiency gave me no pleasure, even there, at the bottom of the tunnel. The humblest tasks, done fully, have a way of returning something to you.

X. Einsamkeit — the far end

And now here I am at the far end, blinking. Burned out, if I am honest — not from one great difficulty but from the endless repetition of ordinary ones. There is no single day I could hold up and call hard. That is exactly the trouble. It was all of them, evenly, with no gap wide enough to lie down in.

XI. Der Wegweiser — the signpost home

Term begins again tomorrow, and the relief of falling back into its routine is palpable, almost bodily. The burn of turning three weeks into a drill of getting my house in order lives now in every muscle of my back. I cannot say I feel restored. But I have come out the other side of the tunnel — and there is, at least, that.