I was listening to Deux Arabesques, L. 66 by Claude Debussy, and suddenly wondered: can I claim Arabesque No. 1 as the birthday song of a seasoned loner? Probably only I would do that.

By the way, today is my birthday. There are no humans celebrating it, except myself and non-human things: imaginary characters, solitude, music, RPG characters and LLM saying “happy birthday!”

Among the two Arabesques, Arabesque No. 1 (E major) is the more famous one.

The title “arabesque” itself comes from decorative art: organic geometric patterns that repeat and connect with each other without a single dominant focal point. Debussy translated this idea into music by moving away from the functional harmonic structures of German tradition, which often “move toward” a specific resolution.

And perhaps life can also be viewed this way: without always needing a philosophy that forces someone to have a completely clear purpose and identity.

Clarity can be boring, but it is also a tool that often gives people motivation and persistence to “achieve success,” even though what “success” actually means is often unclear as well.

Its melody flows like endlessly curving lines, floating arpeggios, and subtle tonal ambiguity. There is no classical tension-and-resolution structure, only texture and color existing as an end in itself.

What I find philosophically interesting is how Debussy challenged the assumption that music must “tell a story” linearly, with tension and release narratives like sonata form. Arabesque offers an alternative model: beauty as a pattern, rather than a life journey that must always be coherent, logical, or easily explained.

When I first listened to it, I immediately felt that this music was deeply ambiguous. It was not sad, not happy, not angry. There was no specific emotion that I could easily label. I do not even remember what year it was.

Perhaps that is how memory actually works: it is never truly linear and clear. If we have a memory that feels perfectly clear, maybe it has already been reconstructed by our mind, and then we call it history, biography, or simply a story.

This piece feels like a case of “perceptual complexity, color, texture, and ambiguity intentionally avoiding conventional narrative structures.” It is not the only way to challenge the idea that the value of music is proportional to how “serious” its structure is, but it is one of the most fascinating examples to me.

So why do I want to declare this as my birthday song? I will create the reason now. Perhaps simply because I love its atmosphere, as if it tells the story of a loner whose life does not have the narrative structure found in films, novels, or popular songs.

There is no romance like falling in love, breaking apart, and then finding relief through some philosophical conclusion. There is no clear separation between emotion and logic. There is no single emotional label that can neatly contain everything. Everything blends together inside a mental process, like an arabesque pattern.

At least, that is the model of reality I often experience. When I fall in love, I do not know whether there is some law of nature saying that love must always end happily with another person, or perhaps end tragically.

Maybe the actual law is that the purpose of falling in love is the texture and color of the feeling itself, and we are the ones who reject that possibility by creating an ideal story where love lasts until the end, whether that ending is heartbreaking or comforting.

Alright. I will close this strange little piece of writing that somehow became something else, and place it under the art-resonance label.