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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Never such innocence

May 4, 2009 by Terry Teachout

An old schoolmate who found me on Facebook passed on this 1962 photo of my first-grade class:

FIRST%20GRADE%20CLASS%20PHOTO.jpg

I can’t think my way back into the lost world that is preserved in this photograph–I can only see it in flashes–but I had no trouble spotting the child I was in 1962, shapeless and unformed yet well on the way to becoming recognizable. I already liked to read, and I was clumsy and hated sports. I recall myself as being shy, too, though the woman who sent me the picture says that she remembers me arguing fiercely with our teacher, a tough old bird by the name of Clura Hall. Mrs. Hall, it seems, disapproved of the fact that I wrote with my left hand and was determined to make me change my errant ways. I didn’t.

mat.jpgOther things remain unchanged as well. The school that I attended in 1962, Matthews Elementary, is still open for business. It’s one block north of 713 Hickory Drive, the house where I grew up and where my 79-year-old mother still lives. Most of the people in the photo are alive, and some of them can still be found in or near Smalltown, U.S.A., though I haven’t seen any of them for years.

Are they changed utterly? Am I? What do I have in common with the boy on the front row? I’m still left-handed, brown-eyed, and clumsy. I still love to read–and I’m still shy, though I’ve learned to behave otherwise. But I moved away from Smalltown well over half a lifetime ago, and I left behind much of what I thought I was. First I wanted to be a fireman, then a concert violinist, then a schoolteacher. Never did I imagine myself living in New York, writing books, or becoming a drama critic. Nor would the boy in the picture have been able to grasp what it would mean to do any of those things.

If I could talk to him, what would I say–and would there be anything I could say that would make sense to him? Listen, Terry, your friends are going to start thinking that you’re strange, but don’t worry–you’ll grow up and move away from Smalltown and spend your life among people who think you’re perfectly normal. Somehow I doubt that would register.

340205.jpgA few months ago I posted an excerpt from “Walking Distance,” a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone in which Gig Young trips over a crack in time, finds himself in the small town where he grew up, and runs into a little boy who turns out to be his younger self. He tries to do what I just imagined doing–and, needless to say, it doesn’t work. Small children know nothing of the future: they barely know the difference between today and tomorrow. What they see is what there is. Do I know better now? I wonder. Samuel Beckett said it: “We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”

Have I awakened at last from my youthful dream of the eternal present, forty-seven years after my first class photo was taken, the one at which I now look with bemusement? Am I seizing the day? Or is someone else looking at me and shaking his head at my continuing obliviousness to the speed with which the hands race round the clock?

TT: Almanac

May 4, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Droll thing life is–that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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