« TT: Almanac | Main | TT: Almanac »
February 17, 2005
TT: New York time
A reader passes on this quote from Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and one of the artists I admire most:For seventeen years, I lived in New York. It was a wonderful adventure, a great part of my life. But, after a while, it began to bother me that the whole purpose of living in those concrete canyons--the world of right angles--was all the cultural events that you could take in. That somehow seemed to put a lot of pressure on the cultural events. Unless you have attended three operas and five ballets and six new restaurants this week, you're not keeping up. I found that people taking in these events weren't thinking about them, but they were sure listing them. There was a lot of "have you seen this," but not enough of "what was this like for you?" As I reach this advanced age [sixty], the luxury of having time to think, to savor it, has become important to me.
The quote was new to me, but the sentiment wasn't. It's something I think about often. (Well, fairly often.) New York is a cultural echo chamber, and it's noisy inside. Especially if you do what I do for a living, you're always aware that there's exciting stuff going on every day, and you feel compelled to try to see and hear as much of it as you possibly can, since that's the whole point of living here. Of course New York is full of wonderful people, too--I've never had so many good friends as I do right now--but we're all here for the same reason, which is to be as close to the center of things as we can get. No doubt there are also plenty of hermits in Manhattan, but I tend not to run into them at intermission.
I don't claim to be the most spiritual person in the world, but I'm very much aware of the dangers of living in a place that puts so many obstacles in the path of contemplation. Last year I posted an almanac entry by Santiago Ramon y Cajál: "Small inward treasure does he possess who, to feel alive, needs every hour the tumult of the street, the emotion of the theatre, and the small talk of society." (It's the epigraph to the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein ballet Facsimile.) I don't think I need those things every hour, or even every day, but it's perilously easy to become habituated to the unceasing stimulus of life in New York, and before you know it you lose touch with the quiet at the heart of things, and your soul starts to shrivel.
Do I get out of town often enough? Do I take the phone off the hook often enough? Do I sit in my living room and revel in the Teachout Museum often enough? To all of the above, even the last, my answer is a reluctant no. Yet I do these things often enough to know when I need to be doing them more often: I feel their absence, and sooner or later I act on that feeling. If I didn't I'd go mad, or cease to be myself.
Having said this, I freely acknowledge that my enthusiastic embrace of the world of art is deliberate. A friend reminded me the other day of W. Jackson Bate's remark that Dr. Johnson, my hero, had "a great experiencing nature." I aspire to that. I've spent three or four longish stretches of my life in comparative isolation, during which I spent most of my time reading, writing, and thinking. Today I'm drawing on the capital I accumulated back then--and I'm also accumulating a different kind of capital, the kind you get by experiencing art passionately and regularly. I'm sure the time will come when I no longer want to be out on the town so much (or am no longer capable of it), and then I'll have a well-stocked cellar of memories on which to draw.
One of these days I hope to write a short, pithy book about the unity of the arts, the sort of book that is the product of much experience and much contemplation. Right now I'm getting the experience. The contemplation will come later. Or not. Leonard Woolf's last volume of autobiography is called The Journey Not the Arrival Matters. I don't know whether he was right, but I do know that the arrival, unlike the journey, is out of my hands.
I hasten to point out, by the way, that Michael Tilson Thomas is a great artist, while I am...well, a pretty good journalist. He's also a decade my senior, which means that he ought to be stepping back from the fray and allowing his inward treasure to crystallize into aesthetic wisdom. For me, there'll be time enough to do that later, and if there isn't, I can't imagine that it'll be the world's loss. Unlike Thomas, the best I have to offer as a writer arises from my going to and fro in the world of art, then coming home to report on my enthusiasms and excitements. That's what I do and what I love to do, and so long as I keep on loving it I'll keep on doing it--with an occasional day off to sit quietly, catch my breath, and be enveloped by the waiting silence.
Posted February 17, 2005 12:01 PM
