Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

Restless ambition hides inside this apparently practical itinerary: Vienna for the “real” education, Paris for a quick calibration, and the orchestra as a kind of moral apprenticeship before claiming the podium. Mathews frames his plan in the modest conditional - “perhaps,” “I thought,” “could do with” - a syntax of hedges that reads less like uncertainty than self-fashioning. He’s rehearsing the story of becoming, positioning himself as someone who understands the old European ladder of legitimacy: you don’t just conduct; you earn the right by absorbing the canon in the right cities, under the right atmospheres.

The subtext is classed and cultural. Vienna isn’t just a place, it’s a credential, a shorthand for seriousness and authority in Western music. Paris functions as the cosmopolitan antechamber, where “a little training” sounds casual but signals access, mobility, and a belief that art can be engineered through proximity to the correct capitals. The phrase “before I got to Vienna” implies Vienna as destiny, Paris as useful seasoning - a telling hierarchy of taste.

Coming from Mathews, a writer associated with Oulipo and procedural play, the line also reads like an origin myth that’s suspiciously tidy. It’s the kind of rational, step-by-step narrative people offer to make a life of detours look inevitable. The charm is in its quiet comedy: the grandest aspirations delivered in the tone of someone planning a sensible stopover, as if genius were just good logistics.