Archives for January 1, 2013

We were there, and saw it from the back porch of our cottage:

A year ago today I was with Mrs. T on Sanibel Island. I’d just learned that my mother was dying, and I was doing my best to come to terms with the knowledge. A week later I got a call from Massachusetts informing me that Shakespeare & Company had decided to produce
my first play. In the months that followed, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, drove down Highway 1 from San Francisco to San Diego, spent five weeks at the MacDowell Colony, saw Satchmo at the Waldorf produced by three regional theaters, made four new friends, finished writing the greater part of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, and stood by my mother’s open grave. No matter what 2013 turns out to be like, it won’t be like that. It couldn’t.

I brought 2012 to a close yesterday by writing the first three thousand words of the antepenultimate chapter of Duke. A year from now, barring some unthinkable catastrophe, Duke will be in print and I’ll have seen a hundred more shows. Beyond that, I’ve no idea what to expect. I don’t know what my next book will be, or whether Satchmo will have a life after its most recent closing night. I know where I’ll be for the next six weeks…and that’s all.

Is it enough? It’d better be.

I once quoted in this space the following words of Ogden Nash. It seems fitting to repeat them today:

Come, children, gather round my knee;

Something is about to be.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.

Duck! Here comes another year.

To all of you who, like me, suspect that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, I hope that 2013 treats you not unkindly, and that your lives, like mine, will be warmed by hope and filled with love.

From 2004:

I’d never want to know how a masterpiece ends prior to experiencing it for the first time. To be told what happens is to be cheated of the opportunity to sprint breathlessly from beginning to end, propelled by the overwhelming desire to know–and what happens in the last two pages, or the last thirty seconds, can make all the difference in the world. Think of the finale of The Four Temperaments, with its spectacular, gravity-dissolving lifts that sum up all that has gone before. Or the explosive stutter of the final chords of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Or the very last sentence of “The Turn of the Screw,” which slams like an oak door in the face of the stunned reader….

Read the whole thing here.

“Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.”
Francis Bacon, “Of Travel”