When I go to sleep with a fever, my dreams tend to be vivid and complex. (When I get sick while asleep, which has happened a few times, my dreams are the opposite — stick figures against white or gray backgrounds. Absolutely true.) Yesterday an incipient cold that I caught while walking in the rain in Lancaster, PA, on Saturday turned into a full-blown Force 10 fever — the kind where there’s a white-hot bar of pressure across the bridge of your nose turning your eyeballs into puddles of lava, and even the air hurts your skin.

You know how with a fever you feel best around noon and then as the day wears on you get steadily worse? Well, by 8 p.m. I was pretty much dead. I crawled into bed but I couldn’t fall asleep. So I killed time by listening to some of my favorite Comfort Music, particularly Maurice Ravel. His music doesn’t play in my ears; it plucks the strands of my DNA. Just the kind of trip I needed at that moment.

While listening to his Pavane, and delirious, I wandered over to his bio on Wikipedia. Ah, such names! Such times! Satie, Faure, and Debussy! Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov! Bakst, Fokine, Diaghilev, Nijinsky! 1899! 1905! I just let myself drift away into a sepia-toned Lartigue panorama of La belle epoque.

As I slept, I had a most wonderful dream. All those men had gathered together in my sunny, arboreal drawing room for a salon. In intimate clusters of two and three they were having heated debates, telling stories and laughing at jokes, picking out tunes on the piano, debating philosophy, and critiquing, critiquing, critiquing. It was raucous, invigorating, a spectacle.

Around 11:30 my fever broke, and so did the salon as the guests began to take their leave — handshakes of farewell and gratitude, calls across the room to departing friends, the shuffle of donning coats and hats. After the last guest had left, I noticed a handwritten manuscript lying on one of the tables. As I looked at it, I realized that it hadn’t been forgotten; the guests had been collaboratively writing it throughout the salon, and had left it as a gift of thanks to their host.

I looked at the title: Ravel l’Aviateur — The Aviator Ravel. I started reading; it’s an amazing story they created.

I’m looking forward to translating the rest of it.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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