"Scriabin came to believe in a final harmony that
would undo the world, spell an end to existence.
Play the right chord at the right place at the right
moment, and the whole shebang would collapse.

"And he was preparing to play that chord, when
blood poisoning struck him down.

"'What a disaster,' he cried, and no one knows to
what those last words referred--whether to the fact
that he himself was dying, from a pimple under his
moustache, or to his being balked in the great work
of ending the universal scheme of things."

--Keith Waldrop
fr. The Locality Principle
[Penngrove, Calif.: Avec Books, 1995]