For the past few months, most of my adult exchanges have begun with the question: “How are you doing?” and the answer: “Holding it together.” This is an exchange I am used to. When my wife died, two years earlier, I heard many times that I should “hold it together for the children.” Grievers are often expected to hold it together, even if only for the sake of those around them.
Holding it together (as apt a phrase as any for this moment of self-isolation, anxiety, and political failure) implies that there is something coming apart. But what? Commonly, people use the phrase without any specific object, to emphasize not whatever is being held together, but their own efforts to cope. In other words, one’s life is not the it coming apart. The it is one’s sense of reality—touching one’s face, standing closer than six feet apart, shaking hands, face-to-face learning—which is directly related to a sense of what is unreal, what is not normal. In other words, unlike actual reality (if such a thing exists), one’s sense of reality consists of what makes one real to oneself. When your sense of reality comes apart, so does your sense of self.
This year, there was no Bayreuth Festival, no Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, or Aix. But one concert, in a dilapidated medieval church in eastern Germany, could not be canceled, because it had already started — more than 18 years before the coronavirus pandemic struck. And it’s not scheduled to end until the year 2640.
On Saturday, a small crowd of mask-wearing music enthusiasts gathered in the church, St. Burchardi, in the town of Halberstadt, about 120 miles southwest of Berlin. The occasion was the first sound change in almost seven years in the slowest concert in the world: an organ recital of a piece by the American composer John Cage. It was the 14th chord change since the concert began on Sept. 5, 2001, on what would have been Cage’s 89th birthday.
I don’t know how Ruth Ware manages to keep up her pace of writing such fine and distinctive suspense novels every year (even Christie needed to take a break every so often); but, on behalf of suspense lovers everywhere, may I say that I’m grateful she has turned out to be a marathoner, rather than a sprinter.
Reading Sigrid Nunez’s absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice. You have to really pay attention. Be assured, however, that the experience will be worth it. You will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful, as if you have benefited from an excellent literary massage of sorts.
Down in the basement, jacked on Kimbo,
I’m screwdriving chunks of OxiClean
into the washer.