In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

Oremus…

§ Matins. A couple of things were special on Friday night. It wasn’t the sort of concert that I go out of my way to hear — and that’s a mistake; it ought to be. Bartok, Debussy, and Holst, all superbly performed. The second thing may have explained the first: it was not, as the saying goes, my father’s Philadelphia Orchestra. It wasn’t my Philadelphia Orchestra, either. I was struck by the enormous and very positive change in concertizing that has taken place in the past twenty years or less, as major orchestras have been reconstituted by young players for whom the word “professional” connotes engagement, not disdain.

But what hit me hardest was the recognition that Carnegie Hall is a holy place. Every time I go to a concert there, I’m even more keenly aware, if that’s possible, of the hall’s long history, of the fortunes, musical and otherwise, that have risen and fallen since Tchaikovsky led the first official program in 1891. I think of how dusty it was when I was a boy, how it reeked (to my imagination) of émigrés speaking in thick, Central European accents, talking of richly sophisticated matters as if they were as comfortable as commonplaces — and intertwining them with piquant personal remarks. I am not prone to metaphysical sensations, but when I feel all the music that has been made in that great room, and imagine how beautiful it almost always must have sounded, Carnegie Hall equals any cathedral for beauteous earnest.

I’m not talking, here, of art music as a “substitute” for religion. What I mean is that there has always been a stratum, more or less thick, of concertgoers for whom what goes on inside Carnegie Hall is about as important as anything — and they share this sensation in the way that a congregation bears — and shares — witness. It would be misguided to speak of worship. But the public celebration of what’s important puts Carnegie’s concerts on the same footing as weddings, baptisms, and funerals in a great church.

Today, Carnegie Hall looks the part of a great temple better than it ever has. But its reputation as a holy place of music has little to do with its appearance. To appreciate this, in fact, it helps to close your eyes. But not for too long: you wouldn’t want to fall into thinking that you were alone.

§ Tierce. Reading this story about the ingenious bodybuilders who can’t resort to Gold’s to bulk up their biceps, I began thinking that the idea that the United States ought to be exporting is not “democracy,” a highly abstract concept that means different things in different cultures, and that in any case is a notion that Americans have lucked into without really understanding themselves. Rather, what we ought to be spreading is the idea of fair play. Ever since the early days of the British Empire, fair play has attracted the admiration of otherwise resentful colonials — with the result that Britain no longer leads the world in cricket championships. “Fair play” is written into our mother tongue.

Any idea of economic fair play would allow industrious and clever entrepreneurs to enjoy the fruits of their contribution to society — within reason. It would not, however, allow successful businesnessmen to harden the carapace of an elite class, so that ordinary workers would have no hope of penetrating it. A society committed to fair play tries very hard to minimize the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

In the past, the United States has been a beacon of the idea of fair play, and justly so. At the moment, I fear, we seem to grasp the importance of fair play hardly any better than we understand democracy. And as for working toward either — !

§ Sext. Here’s how dubious my values are: when I first heard this story — garbled as only Fossil Darling, his mind on twenty CUSIPs at once, can garble a story — I was appalled to think that Eliot Spitzer’s squeeze was an alumna of Blair Academy. It’s with great relief that I read that, on the contrary, Cecil Suwal, class of ’02, was his madam.

§ Vespers. One less piece of paper to lose. No more neurotic breast-pocket groping!

Of course, I’d still rather take the train. Which all by itself is a reason to live in Europe. One can live without planes — and, even better, without cars.

Ordinarily, I sit in the back seat of cars — because they’re taxis. This weekend, I rediscovered the discomforts, for someone of my height and restricted vertebral mobility, of sitting in the front seat. I had to remember, for instance, to close the door, partially, before getting in, because I can’t reach the handle of a fully-opened door once I’m sitting inside a modern sedan. For another — oy, my knees. There was something about the angle of extraction (remember, I can’t duck) that put an excruciating extra pressure on my weak links. Getting out of the car, I must have looked an unfit ninety-seven — and that may be a slur on nonagenarians.

§ Compline. The tune is an amplification of Itsy-Bitsy Spider.

Riann hadn’t quite got the last word right. “Gorn,” she sang, putting me in mind of the D of D. We had no idea what she ought to have been singing. The awful pun at the end — which is what Kathleen chiefly remembered about this song — never occurred to us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 1:30 am and is filed under Big Ideas, Faits Divers, Music, The Hours, Yorkville High Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.