Archives for April 17, 2012

A young friend of mine read yesterday’s posting about my visit to Fort Tryon Park and wrote to me as follows: “Your ending gave me the chills a little bit. I wonder if it’s possible to feel and fully embrace your youth while you’re young.”
To which I replied, reluctantly:

No, it’s not. Only in flashes, and they don’t happen very often. Mostly you just live it day by day, and long after the fact you look back and remember what it was like, and marvel at how you didn’t understand it while it was happening.
That’s what the end of Our Town is about.

I saw Our Town for the first time on stage in 1989, when I was thirty-three years old. I didn’t fully understand it then, but I think I do now:

For those who missed Bob Brookmeyer’s memorial service last week, Doug Ramsey has posted a report that includes several first-hand accounts, as well as the text of my brief remarks about Bob. To read it, go here.

From 2004:

Those of us who write about music, needless to say, would like it if there were a direct positive correlation between intelligence and musical talent. Intellectuals always take it for granted that theirs is the highest form of life. If they had a bumper-sticker slogan, it’d be “Intellectuals do everything better.” In fact, there are all sorts of things they do spectacularly badly (though they’re rather good at conniving at mass murder), and it’s almost always hard for them to accept the fact that Big Ideas get in the way of the making of great art….

Read the whole thing here.

“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”