My phone is full of photos taken on quarantine walks. Messages written by sidewalk chalk prophets. Dozens of rocks laid carefully around the base of a tree, all painted brightly with inspirational phrases: Sometimes you need to let things go. This too shall pass. Garden gnomes in sunglasses gathered in a tiny beer garden. And so many trees, their beautiful bodies rooted in something deeper than this unknowable moment. Branches reaching, exhausted, determined, elegant. I’m fascinated with the delicate shadows that dance below them. Picture after picture of dark veins sprawled across cold gray cement, swaying in the wind. Bold and black when the sun was high. Faint and gray when she was hiding. Temporary beings at best, erased with each sunset, and never born the same the following day. But more alive than any creature caught breathing. I’ll stand there staring for minutes at a time as if this were a secret language I could learn. Or maybe one I used to know.
I really don’t know why I ran 12 marathons in a year or whether I learned anything from the whole deal. But I’m not searching for those answers. Even though I don’t live in a world where “the morals of despair,” as Dylan sang, prevail, I still don’t subscribe to anything other than being the architect of my own nothingness. When someone asked me why I went through all that effort and trouble, all I thought was, Because it seemed like the wrong thing to do.
For some people, the objects of a life, identifying heirlooms, remain a physical source of comfort, even a necessity, holding the past together in one coherent place. For the rest of us, these objects and places live only in memory’s imaginal realm. They can no longer be turned in the hand or searched for evidence. They are ghosts. Immigrants or refugees, we live like survivors of flood and fire, with the clothes on our backs and whatever possessions a new life affords us. Still, even when we deny their necessity, the lost things call out to us. They are the future as well as the past, emblems of the final letting go.
It is my father himself I would rather have kept. Maybe that is why people hang on to old things from the past — because they can. The fact that I could not only reminds me, quietly, daily, what those things mean.
Invoking the gods always runs a risk; one thinks of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, inviting his demon killer to dinner. Nevertheless, Aucoin perceives the danger as essential for his artform, and the Boston native, still only 31, has contended with it well enough to win a Macarthur “genius grant.” His own originals start with “Crossings,” 2015, derived from Walt Whitman’s poetry and first performed at Harvard, the composer’s alma mater. But his true home is the one he described, in the first sentence of his first book, as “another planet.” Aucoin dwells in opera, participating at every level from joining the chorus to founding his own American Modern Opera Company — the acronym for which, he stipulates, is pronounced as in “running amok.”
In “The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera,” Aucoin also provides his Company’s definition of opera: “the medium in which art forms collide and transform one another.” For shouldn’t a winning performance please both ear and eye, both break the heart and lift the spirits? Shouldn’t a true maestro “combine all these elements” in what Wagner called a “total work of art?”
In “The Second Mrs. Astor,” best-selling author Shana Abe draws an intimate portrait of John Jacob Astor IV as seen through the eyes of his second wife, Madeleine Force Astor. This is historical fiction at its finest.