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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 26, 2020

Blessings in disguise

November 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Not long after Hilary died, an old friend of mine who is also a psychiatrist said something that stayed with me: “You should try to reach a point where you can see your marriage to her as a blessing.” My Jewish friends have a different way of putting it: May her life be as a blessing. But it was difficult for me to feel that way in the first few months that followed Hilary’s cruelly untimely death, fixated as I was on the sheer wrongness of it. To die a month after receiving the double lung transplant for which we’d spent seven long years waiting—how could that make any kind of sense?

Would that I had found solace in the comforts of faith. Alas, I was unable to drive these terrible lines from King Lear out of my tortured mind:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.
They kill us for their sport.

Only in the past month or so have I started to find it possible—on occasion—to remember with joy the good times that Hilary and I shared during the fifteen years of our marriage. Knowing that her life would inevitably be cut short, I resolved early on to fill what remained of it with what we called “adventures,” most of which I chronicled on this blog. We traveled from coast to coast seeing shows for The Wall Street Journal. We drove up Highway 1 from San Diego to San Francisco one summer, and made the same trip in reverse two years later. We spent a long weekend cruising on a windjammer and eating fresh lobster, the food she liked best, so much so that I made sure it was on the menu of every restaurant where we dined on our annual trips to Maine. We stayed in three different Frank Lloyd Wright houses and went to two county fairs (I rented a wheelchair for the day and pushed her from ride to ride). I wrote an opera libretto and a one-man play about Louis Armstrong, and Hilary was in the audience for the opening nights of both shows, as well as the night when I made my debut as a professional stage director. And—best of all—we spent the better part of six winters on Florida’s Sanibel Island, our favorite place in the world.

Hilary was the ideal traveling companion, throwing herself into our shared adventures with contagious gusto. Though she didn’t much care for the novels of Henry James, I think she would have liked these lines from The Ambassadors: “Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?” Knowing that she was destined to die before her time, she lived all she could, and I delighted in dreaming up new ways for her to do so. To see her wonderful smile—it lit up her whole face whenever she was happy—never failed to make my efforts worthwhile.

This is the first Thanksgiving since Hilary’s death, and I’m trying to be thankful for what we had, and grateful that I (usually) knew how happy our life together was while we were living it. The two of us saw Our Town together four times, in Petersborough, Hartford, New York, and Boston, and though we never talked specifically about the question that Emily asks the Stage Manager at play’s end, I feel certain that Hilary was at all times intensely aware of its immediate relevance to her condition: “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” Hilary did, and because she did, so did I.

Even now, such gratitude doesn’t come easily to me—I’m still bruised by what I went through in the last couple of years of Hilary’s life, when her health started spiraling inexorably downward—but I hope that the adventures we shared will someday be the first thing I think of when I think of her. That will be a blessing.

*  *  *

A scene from the 2002 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with Maggie Lacey as Emily and Paul Newman as the Stage Manager:

Almanac: Samuel Beckett on how not to live

November 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“VLADIMIR: Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

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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