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Almanac: Pablo Neruda on hope

January 1, 2021 by Terry Teachout

I wait for you in the harshest desert
and next to the flowering lemon tree,
in every place where there is life,
where spring is being born,
my love, I wait for you.

Pablo Neruda, “Letter on the Road” (trans. Donald D. Walsh)

A year ago today, my beloved Hilary was in an intensive-care unit at New York-Presbyterian, fighting for her life as she awaited a double-lung transplant. She had no idea that worse awaited her—as it did the whole world. I lost her three months later, and my life since then has been lonely and blue, though relieved by friendships that I treasure. Even so, there are very few parts of 2020 that I would willingly live over again. For me as for most people, it has been, literally, a frightful year.

Such being the case, allow me to quote Ogden Nash, as is my longstanding custom on the last day of the year:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.
Tonight’s December Thirty-First,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

If, like me, you have come to the conclusion that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, then I hope the year to come treats you not unkindly and that your lives will be warmed by hope and filled with love—and if you feel otherwise, then I wish for you the very same thing. No one should have to be unloved on New Year’s Eve.

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The Miles Davis Quintet plays Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on Swedish TV in 1967. Wayne Shorter is the tenor saxophonist, Herbie Hancock the pianist, Ron Carter the bassist, and Tony Williams the drummer:

The cost of talent—and grief

December 31, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I write about the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s webcast of a radio play written and performed by Alan Ayckbourn. Here’s an excerpt.

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Alan Ayckbourn, a great playwright who masquerades as a popular entertainer, remains abundantly active at the age of 81. Not only does he continue to write—80 plays to date—but he acted in a radio play of his own, “Anno Domino,” that was webcast in June by Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, the company Mr. Ayckbourn led from 1972 to 2009. Now he has given us a second radio play, “Haunting Julia,” first staged in 1994 and newly adapted and directed by the author for audio-only performance, in which he plays three parts with seemingly casual virtuosity.

“Haunting Julia” is a latter-day ghost story about a Mozart-like musical prodigy who died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 19 and with whose suicide the play’s three characters are still obsessed 12 years later….

“Haunting Julia” is a ghost story in the sense that inexplicable things take place in it (none of which I will describe here). But it is, I think, better understood as a psychological drama about the devastating emotional damage wrought upon people who find it impossible to come to terms with the untimely death of a loved one. Seen from that point of view, it is singularly well suited to the moment…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Philip Larkin on love

December 31, 2020 by Terry Teachout

The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”

Almanac: Terence on memory

December 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

I will make you always remember this place, this day, and me.

Terence, “Eunuchus”

Just because: Louis Armstrong performs “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”

December 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Louis Armstrong and his big band perform “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” by Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen, in 1933:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Lookback: a holiday wedding

December 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

From 2004:

I haven’t taken part in many weddings in my life, and none at all in recent years, so when my friend Laura asked me to read the Eighty-Fourth Psalm at her wedding last Saturday, I juggled my holiday plans and found a way to get myself to the church on time….

Read the whole thing here.