There is neural activity but a loss of signal. Music might be a useful metaphor. What is perceived as synchronous or beautiful or joyful is the expression of an extremely complex orchestrated process. A symphony, for example, consists of a wide range of instruments being played with great skill to a score and under the supervising coordination of a conductor. In the audience we do not attend to the component parts, except perhaps when things go wrong. We embrace the totality of it.

M.K.: I’ve always constructed them on two levels: on the first, I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes. The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat.

M.K.: A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence.

Not even Beethoven in his Sonata Opus 26 avoids the stereotype— he follows a funeral march (the third movement there too) with a cheerful finale. But the fourth movement in the Chopin sonata is altogether strange: pianissimo, fast and short, with no melody, absolutely unsentimental: a distant gust, a muffled sound that heralds the ultimate forgetting. The juxtaposition of these two movements (sentimental-unsentimental) makes you gasp. It is absolutely original. I mention it to show that to compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side— and that, to me, is the writer’s subtlest craft.

I even used to think that the form that obsessed me was some sort of algebraic definition of my own personality, but one day several years ago, as I was studying Beethoven’s Quartet 131, I had to give up that narcissistic and subjective conception of the form. Look:

First movement: slow; fugue form; approximately 7:30 minutes
Second movement: fast; unclassifiable form; 3:30
Third movement: slow; exposition of a single theme; 1:00
Fourth movement: slow and fast; theme and variations; 14:00
Fifth movement: very fast; scherzo; 5:30
Sixth movement: very slow; exposition of a single theme; 2:00
Seventh movement: fast; sonata form; 6:30

Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movement, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on)