In 2011, I lived in Berlin for a year, accompanying my partner who had a fellowship in the city. For the previous three years, I had been experiencing what felt like a continuous sorrow, which the doctors called depression. For months at a time, I had found it difficult to move, rise from bed, and think clearly. Perhaps the reasons for this state were many and old. I had been working on a novel that troubled me. That work, Dogs at the Perimeter, had brought me to Cambodia over months and years to research the Cambodian Civil War and genocide. After five years of thinking and re-thinking, returning often to this country that I loved, the novel was published that spring.

But I could not lift myself from the things I had learned. One morning, worried that I was falling back into illness, I took my music player and went for a long walk. I found myself in a neighbouring area where thirty-three viaducts, the Yorckstrasse bridges, span a busy thoroughfare. The vast majority of these bridges, supported by numerous cast iron columns, lead nowhere, or are obsolete; their destinations— warehouses and yards—were destroyed during the Second World War. It felt like walking through a light and dark corridor, ruined, disturbing, and full of memory. The structures still in use rumble as trains arrive and depart, or as the traffic at street level grows heavy.

As I came to the bridges, Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations began playing through my headphones. I passed beneath these bridges that led to nowhere. The opening aria, haunting and simple, passed through me. From this aria, Bach builds his variations. A handful of notes, initially played by the left hand, are reworked into a series of thirty variations and canons, as if a strand of DNA is living out its permutations. These unfolding variations elicit joy, playfulness, grief, lightness, devastation, wonder, and more: a universe of feel- ings for which we have no names. I wept as I passed under the Yorckstrasse bridges, through the endless movement, changes and histories around me and into those thirty minutes of music. So many things of life seemed tied together, unwilling to be separated, shading into the next and the next.

Over the next five years, I listened to the Goldberg Variations again and again as I worked on another book. This one would be about music, revolution, and time. This novel became Do Not Say We Have Nothing, published in 2016. The Goldberg Variations provided a structure to this five-hundred-page work; it provided hope in the form of beauty, continuity, and the re-experiencing of time itself, time which grows ever more dense and complex as the wheel turns, as history rises, overwhelms, recedes, and returns around us.

Even now, years later, when I re-listen to Glenn Gould’s recording, I’m brought back to the world that seemed to open around me back in 2011. Lately, I’ve fallen in love with Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas. People say that, through these compositions, Beethoven, who by then had lost his hearing, found a way to bring together old forms and present dichotomies; he found a further way to exist. Like the Goldberg Variations, these three sonatas continue to confound, move, and enchant me even after count- less listenings; they create an ever-shifting landscape. The recordings that move me greatly are those by Claude Frank, who passed away in 2014.

Madeleine Thien has published three novels and a short story collection. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in Vancouver, she lives in Montreal and is a professor of English at the City University of New York.