On Beauty

May 28

It has been a beautiful spring.

Surely you’ve noticed? Even in March and April, when most of us were watching the world through our windows, we could see the gloriousness of nature on display. From my office, up on the third floor, my window abuts the branches of one of our black walnut trees. Their leaves come out late, the trees still bare when the rest of the backyard has turned green. But they come out nevertheless, new pale-green leaves in a wash of color against the brown branches.

Perhaps I’ve never noticed before. Or if I’ve noticed, it’s been while driving past the forsythia on the Bypass on my way to work, my mind less on the natural world than on what I’m going to be saying in the classroom in a few minutes. This year, nature has been on its own, and we’re lucky to see it.

I’ve just finished rereading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. For those who don’t know, we learn in the first few pages that the hero of the novel, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, has escaped an explosion in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (a terrorist act that kills his mother) carrying with him Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, a simple but bewitching portrait of a bird chained to a post, watching us with wary eyes. Theo does many things over this novel’s seven-hundred-plus pages, but the painting (reproduced in full cover on the book’s first pages) is the center that holds everything together. Why? Because…it’s beautiful.

In this time of pandemic, beauty may be the saving grace—at least for those who have the leisure to contemplate it. Theo admires The Goldfinch, wondering why Fabritius (a pupil of Rembrandt, all of whose other paintings were all destroyed in the explosion in Delft that took his own life in 1654) decided to paint a lonely pet bird, rather than the sumptuous still lifes that were all the vogue in Amsterdam at the time. “Sinewy wings, scratched pinfeather,” writes Tartt. “The speed of his brush is visible, the sureness of his hand, paint dashed thick. And there are also half-transparent passages rendered so lovingly alongside the bold, pastose strokes that there’s tenderness in contrast, and even humor…He wants us to feel the downy breast-fluff, the softness and texture of it, the brittleness of the little claw curled about the brass perch.”

Even now, I notice little things. The cool, grey light of this afternoon. The curls on my brown cat’s tummy as he stretches on his back in my chair. It’s not hard to go from little things all the way to the whole of creation. I’ve been listening online to some of the philosophy of Zach Bush, a Charlottesville doctor who has some strange, potentially paradigm-shifting ideas about the human microbiome. Those ideas are much too complicated to try to summarize here, but his bottom line is consistent. “We need to find love,” he says. “And love is not a thing: it’s not something to be grabbed. It is an experience…Love is not the fabric of everything—beauty is the fabric of everything. And our reaction to seeing the beauty is love.”

Yes, it’s been a beautiful spring. In our time of troubles, take it in and breathe deep.

May 1 2020

I have a new hobby: making recordings. I’d never done it before. People have periodically asked me if I had recordings of myself, or if I could make them for fund-raising purposes. My reaction was always that I didn’t like recording. Perhaps it’s an urge for freedom. Or….perhaps it’s fear. Fear of being asked to create, in a given moment, a performance that will be permanent. Fear of hearing something about my playing (or my singing) I don’t want to hear. Maybe a fear of learning something new.

Many of you probably have a new hobby, too. It may be as simple as learning to sew face masks—something that my soon-to-be-teenaged daughter, Lena, has been doing.  Or perhaps it’s cooking: not a new activity, perhaps, but the tedium of staying at home night after night might inspire a new determination to do something different, to paw through old cookbooks for new recipes. You may be reading more than before that you’ve had on your reading list for years, but never got further than the first chapter before. Or any number of things. I’m trying to learn Portuguese, for example—primarily so I can speak with my daughter, Flora, who’s been living in Rio di Janiero for several years, in her new native tongue. If each of you were to let me know what’s been going on in your own Charlottesville-area households, the list could be very long and involved.

But new skills may not necessarily be hobbies, but borne of necessity. Anyone who’s out on the streets delivering packages, in grocery stores stocking shelves, in doing construction, or operating hospital equipment have had to learn new ways of doing their work. Things that had previously been second nature now require constant awareness of what must be done in our current circumstances. My prayers go out to these folks, whose willingness to put their lives on the line make it possible for the rest of us to shelter in place.

My new fascination with recording is also borne of necessity. I can’t play each Sunday on that nice grand piano in the sanctuary—a piano I’ve grown very fond of over the years. Instead, the only way of reaching everybody is by making recordings. I’ve just purchased an external microphone—not an expensive one, but the first I’ve ever bought, which I hope will make my home piano sound better.  The recording included with this message, of a Schubert Moment musicaux, is one that I made just now, in the midst of a rainy April afternoon.

Recording is one of the things that’s keeping me involved during these long days. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do, but recording is at least one way of keeping in touch with everybody. I hope you enjoy it.

Where Did the Music Go?

April 15, 2020

That’s a question many of us are asking. Music is a deeply human art, embedded in live, face-to-face performances. It reaches into our deepest rhythmic impulses. It brings us together in song. It expresses what often can’t be expressed in words. It connects people together—even when they’re standing six feet apart. I miss it profoundly.

But music is also adaptable—as are we. We’ve proven this over the past many weeks. Who would have thought that the entire country could be on lockdown? I never would have imagined it possible. And yet, now that it’s here, it feels strangely…normal. Thank heavens we can connect through Zoom and FaceTime and other video communication programs. Imagine what it would have been like forty years ago, when the only person who could make a video call was Dick Tracy in the comics. Seeing people’s faces is much better than hearing their voices.

So music adapts, too. I’ve heard plenty of extraordinary stuff, pulled together by musicians and tech nerds. I’ve heard virtual choirs, and jazz groups performing through separate channels. I doubt I’m capable to doing anything like that here; I don’t think my connection is strong enough, and I certainly don’t have relevant computer knowledge. But we’re learning.

Being isolated for so long is also encouraging a lot of people to perform for each other. I enjoy hearing concerts from people I’ve never heard perform before. It’s encouraging and delightful.

Thank heavens we have our online services! In our isolation, the days all run together. I can’t tell a Tuesday from a Thursday from a Saturday. But Sunday morning is a special time, when we can gather through Zoom and soak in as much love and community as we are able. There are scary moments, but also special moments, when people rise to the occasion.

Remember music. It helps us stay together, even in attenuated electronic form. It gives us hope and gives us life.

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