From 2009:

The last time I hiked up any part of a mountain was in the summer of 2007, a year and a half after I fell victim to a case of congestive heart failure that nearly did away with me. That impromptu expedition to the top of Clingmans Dome was one of the happiest days of my life, and the memory of how it felt to look out on the Great Smoky Mountains from 6,643 feet above sea level was still so strong and vivid that I didn’t think twice about heading up the trail that leads to the summit of Mount Ashland. Had I paused to reflect on what I was about to do, I might well have changed my mind….

Read the whole thing here.

“Other people’s troubles is mostly what folks read the paper for, and I reckon it’s twice the pleasure to them when it’s trouble of a man they know themselves.”

Harold Brighouse, Hobson’s Choice

Russell Oberlin, the great American countertenor, sings Purcell’s “Music for a while” in an undated CBC telecast from the Sixties, accompanied by Douglas Williams on harpsichord. The spoken introduction is in untitled French, but the performance is in English:

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

“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Francis Bacon, “On Beauty”

In today’s drama column, I review a Massachusetts production, Shakespeare & Company’s revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. Here’s an excerpt.

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The belated coming of Kenneth Lonergan to Broadway is one of the best things to happen to theater in America in the past decade. For even though Mr. Lonergan is the finest American playwright of his generation, his work has never been as widely known—or frequently staged—as it should be. As a result, the revivals of “This Is Our Youth” (1996), “Lobby Hero” (2002) and “The Waverly Gallery” (1999) that came to Broadway in 2014, 2018 and last fall have brought him to the attention of theatergoers who were hitherto unfamiliar with his subtle, richly wrought studies of messy lives and moral choices. That said, it’s also true that Mr. Lonergan’s plays were all originally written for performance in off-Broadway theaters, and while they can be effectively mounted in larger houses, as Lila Neugebauer proved with “The Waverly Gallery,” they work best when seen in more intimate spaces.

Witness Shakespeare & Company’s exceptional new revival of “The Waverly Gallery,” which is being performed in that company’s 200-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre in a production staged by Tina Packer, the company’s founder, and starring Annette Miller in the role that won Elaine May a well-deserved Tony two weeks ago. Like Ms. May, Ms. Miller is an octogenarian at the peak of her powers…

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Read the whole thing here.

Edward Elgar and the London Symphony Orchestra perform Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” in a 1931 Pathé newsreel segment filmed at HMV’s newly opened Abbey Road recording studios:

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

“Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion.”

Lord Acton, “Nationality”