Where Have All the Secluded Rendezvouses Gone?

The night before last I went to a local bar to listen to a piano player in a rock band. He is a friend of mine. He is also a superb player. The other musicians played guitar, drums and bass. They were all excellent players. Rock wasn’t their background. They trained as jazz musicians. My friend told me they played rock together because it was so much fun. They grew up on the music. It was obvious they were having a blast.

I don’t usually go to places that cram 50 people plus or minus seven into a 450 square foot room. (That’s 9 square feet per person; so we’re talking 3x3 feet of personal space, roughly the height and width of a coffin.)  But the bar was just around the corner and I wanted to support my friend. So I went. I doubt I will ever go again. From where I was standing at the far end of the room closest to the door with a $6.40 glass of Guinness in my hand, the scene was, to say the least, unnerving.

The leader of the band started off the set talking into a microphone. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Neither, I’ll bet, could anyone else. Apparently, that didn’t really matter. Nobody was listening. The leader went on talking as if the whole room was hanging on his every word.  Then the band started to play. The only thing that changed was that people talked louder. The music was a backdrop to noise. To give the crowd its due, prodded by my friend the piano player it did join in with rhythmic clapping during one of the tunes, but that merely amplified an atmosphere already overwhelmed by noise.

Where did this idea of equating noise saturation with a good time come from? What ever happened to “In some secluded rendezvous?” Maybe Spike Jones did those rendezvouses in with his parody of Cocktails for Two. (If you don’t know it, stop reading now and watch it here.) The people in that tiny bar may love rock, but they sure as hell didn’t come to listen to it. In fact, as far as I could tell the only people really listening were the musicians.  Would that everyone had given the music that much attention.

The noise scene isn’t limited to bars. Several years ago my wife and I went to a neighborhood restaurant that had been opened for just a short time by a local and very well known chef. The noise in the restaurant was so loud it was painful. I couldn’t wait until the meal was over. I told my wife I had to go outside. She stayed to pay. On the way out the chef/owner happened to be standing by the door. I asked him if he would mind stepping outside for a moment.

“I thought the food was great,” I said to him in the relative quiet of a busy street. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to come back here.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“The noise,” I said. “It’s unbearable. Can you tell me why there’s so much noise?”

“It’s the style of the times,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “If it isn’t noisy, people don’t think it's a happening place. We have to turn up the juice.”

What does it mean to be a part of a culture where noise is an indicator of excitement? You can hardly hear yourself think.

Then again, maybe that’s the point.

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Marcel Proust and Me

There are three novels that are an absolute must for every literate creature to have read. The first is War and Peace. The second is Don Quixote. The third is Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I admit to an embarrassment. I have never been able to finish the latter. I started it several times, always under pressure from a friend whose opinion I valued or from a reference in a book that reminded me I hadn’t read it yet.

What has taken me so long?

The truth is I should never have tried to readProust. The descriptions are exquisite, minute, neurasthenic, narcissistic, interminable. But that is when I am reading him. My great discovery is that Proust comes alive when I listen to him while I’m walking.

I recently decided to walk two miles every day. My decision has to do with a back spasm. The walking has definitely helped. But to make the enterprise tolerable, I decided to listen to books. I had recently read The Hare with Amber Eyes, in which de Waal notes the great similarity between Charles Ephrussi, his ancestor, and Proust’s Swann:

They are both Jewish.  They are both homes (sic) du monde.  They have a social reach from royalty (Charles conducted Queen Victoria round Paris, Swann is a friend of the Prince of Wales) via salons to the studios of artists. They are art-lovers deeply in love with the works of the Italian Renaissance Giotto and Botticelli in particular…

The reference was enough to guide me to Audible Books.com where, for $9.99 I got 21 hours of someone reading the whole of A La Recherche unabridged. An incredible bargain. With my Bose noise suppression earphones snugly over each ear, I walk and listen. The combination is perfect.  But why?

I have given that matter some thought. Why should Proust be so enjoyable while I’m walking and such an ordeal when I’m not? This is what I think. When I am walking and listening to Proust, he and I are engaged in the same activity, a minute inspection of a world as if it were brand new.

Proust’s descriptions arise from an obsessiveness characteristic of someone seeing something for the very first time, say, a seven-month old child. Everything about the world is new, exotic, mysterious. It is all an object worthy of the most minute scrutiny. Same with me. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for almost 20 years but I’ve never really seen it, not until now. Now it has come to life with all the intensity of a Proustian word painting.

There is an incredible John Safer installation in one of the Harvard Law School quads (see my previous blog). Had I not taken to walking I would never have seen it, let alone run it through my fingers like a child playing in the sand. Around the corner from my house one of the neighbors has turned his front patch of lawn into a luxurious garden dominated by Lacinato Kale.

Lacinato Kale Growing Just Around the Corner

I look at this while I am listening to Proust describe the colors of an asparagus spear.

But what fascinated me would be the asparagus tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads finely stippled in mould and azure through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet still stained a little by the soil of their garden bed. A rainbow loveliness that was not of this world.  I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them they played lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream at transforming my chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised at this collaboration of walking and Proust. After all, Swann's Way is the name of a footpath.

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My Favorite Spot. Thank you, John Safer.

I have found a favorite spot. It is 1552 steps from my house, about 9/10ths of a mile door to chair. It is in a quiet quadrangle surrounded by Harvard Law School dormitories. For the past two weeks I have walked from my house to the quadrangle. I sit on a wire mesh chair beside a wire mesh table that is one of four sets strategically placed beside a canopy that offers protection should the weather turn wet. So far every day has been fair or, if cloudy, with barely a suggestion of rain.

I like two things about my favorite spot. The first is that apparently it is no one else's.  I’m sure that will change once the students return. But just now it is as free of people as a private beach in the dead of winter.

The Axe

The second thing I like about my favorite spot is a statue by John Safer. It stands a few feet away from my chair. I had not known of this sculptor before coming here. I googled him. I found a page with pictures of his work. The price list page explained that the objects depicted ranged from $6,000 to $3,000,000!

The sculpture that I look at every day was Safer’s first public commission. It was a gift of the class of ’49. It was moved to this somewhat out of the way spot from its original location to accommodate  law school expansion. Since Safer was involved in the relocation, I assume he approved of placing it on the outskirts of Harvard property. I wonder why. It seems to me to be too important a piece to hide under a bushel.

I didn't always think that. When I first sat in my wire mesh chair across from it, the piece struck me as overly opaque with its three angular blobs sitting stolidly on a platform. Nothing in particular about them jumped out at me until one day, as I got up to leave, I caught a glimpse of the profile of the tallest blob. Of course! I exclaimed to myself. How slow not to have seen it before. I savor that moment. It is the way one feels when one is learning a foreign language. In the beginning everything is just a meaningless stream of sounds. Then, suddenly, you hear words and the spaces between them, even though the spaces aren’t really there.

What did it for me was the shape of the tallest blob. It was an executioner’s axe.

The Executioner's Block

The Executioner

Suddenly, the other blobs ceased to be blobs and became sharply focused images. The middle sized one was the hooded head of the executioner. And the massive blob was the executioner’s block. That’s why Safer called it Judgment. Now when I go to my favorite spot, I am not contemplating a shapeless mystery. I am rereading a familiar text, like a favorite bedtime story. 

Even so there is something a bit odd about the installation. Perhaps the class of ’49 had a macabre sense of humor. Or maybe they shared with the sculptor a dark view of the legal profession. Judgment, after all, doesn’t have to be harsh. Think, for example, of the Judgment of Solomon where the death of a child was averted by the wisdom of the king. But this statue brooks no such merciful denouments. There is the axe. There is the axeman. There is the block from which the head will fall. No matter how you slice it, the presence of this sculpture in this quadrangle is a hostile act.

Judgment by John Safer '49

I wonder what the students who live in these rooms think about this meditation on their chosen careers. What do they see when they look out of their windows at the three blobs in the quadrangle? Do they even see it? Perhaps they take it for granted that there is a symmetry between justice and legality. Perhaps the sculptor wanted to call that into question.

After all, he was a graduate of this very school of law, class of '49.

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These Boots Were Made For Walking

This walking thing is quite novel for me. I am amazed at how new my neighborhood appears. And I have lived here 18 years. I am actually seeing much of it for the very first time. This morning a woman was pushing her two-year-old down the street in a stroller. The little boy raised his arm to me in greeting as we passed one another. Now that is a friendly neighborhood.

There are teams of workman digging holes, trimming trees, moving churches in the neighborhood. I have noticed that whenever there is a team that involves one man driving some sort of tractor, a backhoe of some sort or a mobile crane, and two men to put on the finishing touches of whatever is being done, filling in a hole, digging a hole, moving a beam, the driver of the vehicle is always fat while the wielders of the shovels are always thin.  I wonder which came first, the belly or the job?

On my walk I pass an elementary school. Three days ago I saw on the sidewalk in front of the school the remains of some kind of pipe cleaner figure. It caught my eye because of its colors, white, green, brown and red. It had been so badly treated that it was impossible to tell what it was meant to have been. I mention it because it has been in that same spot on the sidewalk for the past three days. Surprising, at least to me, how long a bit of flotsam like that can stay put.

Next to the elementary school is a children’s park. Parents bring their kids to play.  There is a small fountain where a kid can get wet if she wants. There is a very large structure in the middle of the park, a giant monkey bar contraption.  The inner part of the tubular structure is filled with a webbing made out of steel cable that has been tinted a rust color. Children climb all over it, including very young children, maybe four years old.  I watched one little girl way at the top.  She was bare-foot and making her way down from one strand to another. I would have found it quite daunting. It was a long way down, especially for someone that small. Her mother was at the bottom watching, but not at all concerned. She was, if anything, admiring her daughter’s agility.

It is a friendly spot where parents congregate and talk while their children do the same on the various slides and webs and swings put there for their amusement. Today I noticed, however, that way off in one corner a little boy was playing alone in a sandbox. Near him on a bench was his guardian. They were Chinese. Were they sitting apart by choice? The little boy seemed happy enough, but the two of them were striking in their satellite-hood. If they were any farther away from the center of activity, they would be out of the park.

All this walking has created a number of little dramas for me, like the isolated Chinese child. There is, for example, the door stoops on which someone has piled back issues of the Journal of Economics. Who could possibly want those?  But each day the pile diminishes. Today it was gone. On one step a package leans up against the riser. It is from Amazon. It is a book addressed to someone named Xiang. I looked. It’s faded address plate indicates it has been sitting there a long time. How much longer? I wonder what book it is?

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