It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766 and as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (ten) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.
Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time. But for every shock of difference, there’s a start of recognition. Composers’ letters can make frustrating reading. Beethoven’s are brusque, practical affairs; Brahms hides behind a humour as impenetrable as his beard. But with Mozart, you get the whole personality — candid, perceptive and irresistibly alive.
Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. We waited for writers not just to bring other worlds to our small lives but also to give beauty to lives similar to ours. Finding people like ourselves in the pages of books might give our lives some dignity, perhaps even grace.
In 1929, after eight years living abroad in Paris, the photographer Berenice Abbott returned home to New York. While she was away, the city had transformed from 19th-century city to 20th-century metropolis. The city had gotten tall. Everywhere you looked, there were cranes shooting up to the heavens, hauling brick and steel as high as the eye could see, building the skyscrapers that would come to define the skyline. Exhilarated by the changes and eager to document the city she knew, Abbott would spend the next ten years photographing it as part of her Changing New York project, funded, beginning in 1935, by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.
“How shall the two-dimensional print in black and white,” she asked, “suggest the flux of activity of the metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time?” Her photos capture an old New York that she saw vanishing before her eyes, but they use the medium of photography to express something about the ways in which people experience daily life, ever-shifting, in the cities they inhabit. “The form of a city changes, alas! faster than the human heart,” as Baudelaire writes in Les Fleurs du mal; but the camera may do its part to freeze some small corner of the heart of the city, and the way one woman, one day, looked hard at the light, the shadow, and framed the interplay of human heart and metropolis.
What on earth is going on? Why has Scooby-Doo—described by the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott in 2002 as “one of the cheapest, least original products of modern American juvenile culture”—outlasted not only such Hanna-Barbera brethren as The Flintstones and Yogi Bear, but also pretty much everything else on television?
The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon measures what was, not what might have been. Like others who knew Kenyon, I marveled at the blossoming of her work. When she died, we mourned her and commiserated about the poems she would not write. Against the odds, we hoped that what she had written would endure. And so it has.
Like the carpenter whose tools were so dull
he couldn’t for the life of him devise a miter joint
Like the mattress left out on the curb all night
I glued it together against symmetry
from broken earthenware.
Withholding its sexual unsuccess
and omitting the mammy titty,
I wanted something useless to my enemy.