On Living On.

I was thinking tonight about Claude Debussy’s La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin (The Girl With the Flaxen Hair) – a piece which resonates with me more than most – and wondered whether Claude and I would have got on. I settled, of course, on the obvious: I’ll never know because he died a long time before I was born (100 years ago, coincidentally.) And then I heard some self-professed wise person say quietly in my head: ‘The great Claude Debussy is not dead. He lives on in his music.’

Lives on in his music… It’s a tired old cliché, is it not? And it irritates me. You might as well say that the dead rabbit lying in the field lives on in its droppings. Debussy created his music; the rabbit created its droppings. What’s the difference?

Yes, I know there’s a difference of sorts, but I thought about it a lot and continue to maintain that it isn’t substantial enough to warrant the phrase ‘lives on.’ It seems to me that a person can only live on if his or her consciousness persists after physical death and remains sentient in whatever form of reality the undiscovered country allows.

Anyway, you can listen to the aforementioned piece if you like. If you’re unmoved by it, you probably wouldn’t have got on with Claude (or so I suspect.)