“I had bought all these outfits, and I was so looking forward to wearing them,” he said, mentioning with particular wistfulness a lavishly ruffled black Comme de Garçons jacket — “a cross between when Mammy was in mourning after the baby died in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ and something that P.T. Barnum would wear” — now hanging in his closet, an artifact from an alternative reality.
But Sedaris’s realization that it’s no fun dressing up in semi-satirical garments when there is no one to see you is of course not the only thing he has had to contend with. The author of 10 books of autobiographical essays and short fictional pieces, Sedaris, 63, is a keen anatomist of the skewed intricacies of human behavior, and there has been a lot of behavior to sort through at the moment.
Baldwin was hardly naïve about the human capacity for evil, especially in white folk. “If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction,” he said, “because anybody can touch you—when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target of everybody’s fantasies.” But what shocked him was that white America had killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of white America’s debasement and the scope of black America’s peril. “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make,” he wrote. “Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
If King was the preacher, Baldwin was the poet, and he sought to account for his confusion by gathering up the pieces—of himself, of black folk—buried beneath the disaster that was the country. That work kept his despair at arm’s length. To be sure, King’s death, just like those of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and all the others, did not stop time. White people did not stop being white people. Two days after King’s murder, the Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed by Oakland police officers. Later, police rioted in Chicago, during the Democratic National Convention. The nastiness of the white world kept coming, and it gave black politics—and Baldwin’s voice—an edge. King’s death had revealed the bitterness at the bottom of the cup. What Baldwin saw on that dangerous road that led to King’s death, in Memphis, was the difficult question of whether or not the country had the courage to confront its demons. Could America tell itself the truth about how it had arrived at this moment? And did it have the moral stamina to surrender the comfort of its lies?
Yet Venetians believe that they can still save Venice, and many are fighting for it and demanding that politicians do more. They want them to manage tourist numbers and pass new laws to govern property sales and rentals and put an end to the Airbnb-led free-for-all that is pushing residents out. They call for a focus on long-term accommodation at sustainable costs and more jobs through economic diversification. They want more environmental measures, especially a ban on outsized cruise ships, and improved treatment of the lagoon that is vital to Venice’s life.
This has come into sharp focus in the months-long Covid-19 breathing space, when the sudden emptying of the city restored a lost tranquility, along with fish, swans and cormorants to canals no longer churned by excessive traffic. Most of all, it ignited the hope that this difficult moment for the world could eventually offer a turning point.
And yet survival depends on the one resource that artists have in abundance: invention and creativity. “There’s no knowing when this crisis is going to be over, but it will be over. We’re being given a forced reset. Do we do a drive-in concert? Do we go sing in the middle of a field? Do we use smaller venues?”
That last suggestion seems like an odd one for a soprano whose voice lifts easily over a 100-piece orchestra to fill every nook of the Met’s 4,000-seat house, but Goerke can accept new limitations. “I don’t always have to dial it up to 11,” she says. “I do have a setting at five.”
Of course we could begin
with the moon, so famous
and cold,