Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Music Master of Babylon
    The Music Master of Babylon
    The Music Master of Babylon
    Ebook42 pages38 minutes

    The Music Master of Babylon

    By Edgar Pangborn

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    What more fitting place for the last man on Earth to live in than a museum? Now if only he could avoid becoming an exhibit himself!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPerennial Press
    Release dateMar 13, 2016
    ISBN9781531257217
    The Music Master of Babylon

    Read more from Edgar Pangborn

    Related to The Music Master of Babylon

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      To The Mainland

      Dec 6, 2020

      To The Mainland
      5 min read

    • Article

      Titanic Fanatics

      Nov 1, 2020

      Titanic Fanatics
      10 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • Article

      73 Lakes

      Apr 1, 2021

      73 Lakes
      7 min read

    • Article

      Native Nevada

      Jun 6, 2023

      Native Nevada
      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2022

      Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T

      4 min read

    • Article

      Following a Thread

      Sep 19, 2019

      Following a Thread
      6 min read

    • Article

      When Eden Rocked

      Jun 7, 2019

      When Eden Rocked
      11 min read

    • Article

      Sunk, Burned, Survived

      Sep 8, 2023

      Sunk, Burned, Survived
      8 min read

    • Article

      “Properties of Thirst”

      Jul 5, 2022

      “Properties of Thirst”
      11 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 3, 2019

      And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. —Ogden Nash, “Everybody Tells Me Everything,” The Face Is Familiar, 1941 Someone goes by wearing a

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Hermit Of Suvarov

      Jul 30, 2020

      The Hermit Of Suvarov
      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER

      Jun 8, 2023

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
      6 min read

    • Article

      Go Grand

      Oct 22, 2019

      Go Grand
      5 min read

    • Article

      Paradox Formation

      May 25, 2017

      Paradox Formation
      11 min read

    • Article

      Life On The Edge

      Sep 20, 2023

      Life On The Edge
      4 min read

    • Article

      About Town Te Anau

      Apr 19, 2021

      About Town Te Anau
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Shore Thing

      Jul 5, 2023

      A Shore Thing
      6 min read

    • Article

      Lost Lives Remembered

      Aug 18, 2023

      Lost Lives Remembered
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      May 1, 2020

      Neighbors call the stand of pinea ghost forest—t because when glaciers melt,the sea steals onto the land, the saltseeps in, and long established marshes, once fresh, now salt, seizefrom bleach and blacken at the rootof grubby shrubs, grasses, stands

      1 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2023

      O for a beaker full of the warm South … -John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 1819 On the Sunday in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a group of College Board officials happened to be having lunch together in Princeton … talking, as

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Music Master of Babylon

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Music Master of Babylon - Edgar Pangborn

      THE MUSIC MASTER OF BABYLON

      Edgar Pangborn

      PERENNIAL PRESS

      Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.

      This book is a work of fiction; its contents are wholly imagined.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2016 by Edgar Pangborn

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      The Music Master of Babylon

      THE MUSIC MASTER OF BABYLON

      FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, NO one came. In the seventy-sixth year of his life, Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to reject the present and dwell in the lost times.

      He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for example, was 2096; that he had been born in 2020, seven years after the close of the Civil War, fifty years before the Final War, twenty-five years before the departure of the First Interstellar. (It had never returned, nor had the Second Interstellar. They might be still wandering, trifles of Man-made Stardust.) He would recall his place of birth, New Boston, the fine, planned city far inland from the ancient metropolis that the rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994.

      Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that—to shut away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years when he had briefly known a curious intoxication called fame.

      It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject those memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to crave safety as a meadow mouse often craves a burrow.

      He tied his canoe to the massive window that for many years had been a port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he was hardly aware that he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth’s patient star sink toward the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour, it was sometimes possible, if the Sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving too much at the greater stillness.

      There was scattered human life elsewhere, he knew—probably a great deal of it. After twenty-five years alone, that, too, often seemed almost irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings, hushed noons or mornings empty of human commotion, Brian might lapse into anger, fight

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1