In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges our concept of time. Time passes more quickly the closer one is to a gravitational mass (like a planet or a star or a black hole). This fact is popular in science fiction. A space traveler might return to Earth to find that her friends and family have aged more than she has. Even at different altitudes on Earth, time is different. Rovelli writes that if identical twins separate early in life and live one in the mountains and one below sea level, then they will find in old age that the one below sea level has aged more, being closer to the center of the planet.
Time, Rovelli claims, is not linear. It is a gravitational field. If he is right, time is like everything else in the universe and must be made up of extremely tiny particles. There is no past or future; we only experience it this way.
So why, my grief asks, can’t we change times simply by changing our perceptions? Rovelli suggests that our linear experience of time is due to thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the total amount of entropy in the universe can never decrease, only increase. For us, or at least in our section of the universe, time operates in only one direction.
There’s something that people do, but not everyone does it. It involves a hamburger, a shelf, and a lot of time. It goes like this: buy a hamburger from McDonald’s, then just leave it on a shelf to see if it rots. (Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t. It quickly dries out and without moisture, mold won’t grow.)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as a metaphor for submitting. Not writing itself (although a book that lasts is comparable to a burger that won’t rot) but submitting. The act that follows writing but precedes being published, assuming success is the end result. (Spoiler Alert: It usually isn’t.)
And so, finally, we come to the elephant in the room. If writing a book is like climbing a mountain, has he crested the peak of the final volume of LBJ? Is he on his way back down the other side? This is delicate, I know, but does he feel the clock ticking? His eyes close once again. “I have a long way to go,” he says. “I can hear the clock ticking, but the important thing to me is to ignore it. If I was to rush, what would be the sense?” The responsibility of his project – a project to which he has devoted almost half his life – never leaves him. “Almost all the people involved are dead now. They’re leaving you to tell the story, so you’d better get it right.”
Its story is simple: Santiago, an imprisoned Uruguayan radical, longs for freedom, while his exiled wife, daughter, father, and friend struggle to make use of theirs. Benedetti rotates between characters, all of whom speak in monologue form. There are few dramatized scenes, and not much affection or warmth. Benedetti cuts out sensory detail, as if not only Santiago but his family were confined to a concrete cell. The result is profoundly lonely. In style and structure, “Springtime in a Broken Mirror” reproduces the isolation that its characters feel.
Most books on conducting fall into one of two camps. There are the collections of popular anecdotes — Arturo Toscanini’s tantrums, Leonard Bernstein’s orgiastic wriggles and dances on the podium, Fritz Reiner’s and Pierre Boulez’s bland seriousness in summoning thrilling performances from their ensembles. And then there are the practical guides, chock-a-block with musical excerpts, baton techniques and methods of counting time — all valuable to musicians, of course, but somewhat forbidding to the general audience.
And now Mark Wigglesworth, a British conductor who has led orchestras across much of the world, has come up with something unusual: a deft, sensible book of meditations on the craft of conducting, written with grace and humor, unfailingly light in spirit but sometimes profound in its utterance. “The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters” may be read straight through or picked up and put down at leisure, always with profit. It calls to mind a spirited bar conversation with a new friend, somebody you’ve asked to tell you about this most mysterious of musical professions and how it works.
The valley
edge by edge