Here are three things that I had forgotten the awesome nature of, before I came back to the US:
1. Autumn. My favorite season. There are a lot of poems out there about spring and summer, but autumn always reached me on a level those seasons never did. There were so many things about fall that suggested to me the beginning of greatness: shopping for school supplies, buying new clothes, the sudden start of classes after two months of slouching around, swimming and sailing. Autumn was the season when I remembered to sit up straight and pay attention to things again.
Then there's the sheer loveliness of Maryland in autumn. Chicago has beautiful summers and Key West may be temperate all year, but if you want to fall into love or melancholy and stay that way, come to Maryland in autumn. I drove down George Washington Parkway and the highway was empty. The spires of Georgetown, the white protrusion of the Kennedy Center, the gleaming towers of the Lincoln Memorial like the centerpiece of a secular city on a hill, I saw all these on my right. But the trees were brighter than fire. Every warm color in the rainbow was on display. No place on earth - no place I've seen, anyway - can match that particular view. The only thing better is the Blue Ridge Parkway, dotted with vineyards owned and operated by retired chemists and researchers, that gives away eventually to the gleaming hills of Shenandoah National Park. Try it - you'll see what I mean.
2. Piano. Specifically the cherry-wood upright piano that, when my parents bought it fifteen years ago, was the single most expensive thing in our house. It's since fallen badly out of tune and there are cobwebs in the hammers, but when I dusted it off and tried to play it, what emerged sounded something like music. This is saying something, since I haven't played piano since freshman year of college (back in 2000). In those days, viscerally homesick but unwilling to admit it, I'd hang around in the back of the Alice Millar Chapel on my college campus until the stained glass nave was empty. I'd then creep down the main aisle and sit down at the grand piano near the altar and play the first two movements of the Moonlight Sonata practically without breathing. My piano teacher, a former jazz pianist who'd once toured the world and hung out in various places of ill repute, worked on that first movement with me for at least three months. There are a million things about piano I learned first from the Moonight Sonata - how to weight a single finger on a single hand to bring out a hidden melody, the painstaking technique required to slide down a single arpeggio-d set of chords, how to play without taking my eyes off the page.
You know why I like playing the piano? It yields an absolute and unsullied sense of accomplishment: when you master a difficult passage, you've actually mastered yourself. The relationship is clear, the steps are known, and there is no uncertainty. With the piano, perfect control is possible because there's no limit to how many times you can repeat a passage. With life, not so much.
3. Memory itself. Delhi has a long memory but its monuments and landmarks mean nothing deep to me. I never really even visited Delhi before I moved there - my Indian relatives live in Mumbai and Hyderabad - so in a sense I've created my own Delhi. When I walk down the streets and feel like I own them, it's because I've claimed every difficult inch of that life. Which is great, and makes me feel a bit like Columbus may have felt hacking his way through the jungles of the New World, but honestly my home was a part of me before I made any conscious choice in the matter.
For example: I found an old, unmarked cassette tape hidden with my old piano music. I found a cassette player and put it in. How can I describe what I heard? Honestly, language seems imperfect. Very few pianists - with the notable exception of Vladimir Horowitz - have ever really mastered all three movements of the Moonlight Sonata (I never made it past the second, really) and there are very few recordings of the entire thing. Most people play the famous (and much easier) first movement and then call it quits. I once mentioned this to my piano teacher and he made me an impromptu recording of the entire thing. I should mention that my piano teacher may be one of the most talented musicians in the state - he once told me that when he broke his arm as a kid, he found a way to prop the sling on a lamp so he could continue to play piano, even in a limited fashion. So you can imagine how he plays.
Anyway, I thought a lot of things while listening to that tape. At first I came up with this elaborate theory about how artists are underpaid because art suffers from the curse of the commons - in fact, I considered an entire blog entry on that subject - but I've always had this unfortunate tendency to over-intellectualize things, which actually sometimes only serves to make those things more, rather than less, opaque. The truth is, I can't describe what I felt listening to that tape because it was such raw emotion - desperate, joyous, sorrowful, peaceful. Really good music reaches us - maybe - because it circumvents intellect completely. Honestly, for 20 minutes I felt like I was capable of anything, and there are very few moments in my life when I've felt like that without first working very, very hard.
So that tape was a gift, just like driving down the GW Parkway on a fall day past the Lincoln Memorial feels like a gift, just like playing chords while my sister sings a tune is a gift, just like being able to play the piano and master myself - briefly - is also a gift. That's how I feel, visiting the US again after so many years, like I'm being given all these great things - my childhood, maybe? - all over again.
1. Autumn. My favorite season. There are a lot of poems out there about spring and summer, but autumn always reached me on a level those seasons never did. There were so many things about fall that suggested to me the beginning of greatness: shopping for school supplies, buying new clothes, the sudden start of classes after two months of slouching around, swimming and sailing. Autumn was the season when I remembered to sit up straight and pay attention to things again.
Then there's the sheer loveliness of Maryland in autumn. Chicago has beautiful summers and Key West may be temperate all year, but if you want to fall into love or melancholy and stay that way, come to Maryland in autumn. I drove down George Washington Parkway and the highway was empty. The spires of Georgetown, the white protrusion of the Kennedy Center, the gleaming towers of the Lincoln Memorial like the centerpiece of a secular city on a hill, I saw all these on my right. But the trees were brighter than fire. Every warm color in the rainbow was on display. No place on earth - no place I've seen, anyway - can match that particular view. The only thing better is the Blue Ridge Parkway, dotted with vineyards owned and operated by retired chemists and researchers, that gives away eventually to the gleaming hills of Shenandoah National Park. Try it - you'll see what I mean.
2. Piano. Specifically the cherry-wood upright piano that, when my parents bought it fifteen years ago, was the single most expensive thing in our house. It's since fallen badly out of tune and there are cobwebs in the hammers, but when I dusted it off and tried to play it, what emerged sounded something like music. This is saying something, since I haven't played piano since freshman year of college (back in 2000). In those days, viscerally homesick but unwilling to admit it, I'd hang around in the back of the Alice Millar Chapel on my college campus until the stained glass nave was empty. I'd then creep down the main aisle and sit down at the grand piano near the altar and play the first two movements of the Moonlight Sonata practically without breathing. My piano teacher, a former jazz pianist who'd once toured the world and hung out in various places of ill repute, worked on that first movement with me for at least three months. There are a million things about piano I learned first from the Moonight Sonata - how to weight a single finger on a single hand to bring out a hidden melody, the painstaking technique required to slide down a single arpeggio-d set of chords, how to play without taking my eyes off the page.
You know why I like playing the piano? It yields an absolute and unsullied sense of accomplishment: when you master a difficult passage, you've actually mastered yourself. The relationship is clear, the steps are known, and there is no uncertainty. With the piano, perfect control is possible because there's no limit to how many times you can repeat a passage. With life, not so much.
3. Memory itself. Delhi has a long memory but its monuments and landmarks mean nothing deep to me. I never really even visited Delhi before I moved there - my Indian relatives live in Mumbai and Hyderabad - so in a sense I've created my own Delhi. When I walk down the streets and feel like I own them, it's because I've claimed every difficult inch of that life. Which is great, and makes me feel a bit like Columbus may have felt hacking his way through the jungles of the New World, but honestly my home was a part of me before I made any conscious choice in the matter.
For example: I found an old, unmarked cassette tape hidden with my old piano music. I found a cassette player and put it in. How can I describe what I heard? Honestly, language seems imperfect. Very few pianists - with the notable exception of Vladimir Horowitz - have ever really mastered all three movements of the Moonlight Sonata (I never made it past the second, really) and there are very few recordings of the entire thing. Most people play the famous (and much easier) first movement and then call it quits. I once mentioned this to my piano teacher and he made me an impromptu recording of the entire thing. I should mention that my piano teacher may be one of the most talented musicians in the state - he once told me that when he broke his arm as a kid, he found a way to prop the sling on a lamp so he could continue to play piano, even in a limited fashion. So you can imagine how he plays.
Anyway, I thought a lot of things while listening to that tape. At first I came up with this elaborate theory about how artists are underpaid because art suffers from the curse of the commons - in fact, I considered an entire blog entry on that subject - but I've always had this unfortunate tendency to over-intellectualize things, which actually sometimes only serves to make those things more, rather than less, opaque. The truth is, I can't describe what I felt listening to that tape because it was such raw emotion - desperate, joyous, sorrowful, peaceful. Really good music reaches us - maybe - because it circumvents intellect completely. Honestly, for 20 minutes I felt like I was capable of anything, and there are very few moments in my life when I've felt like that without first working very, very hard.
So that tape was a gift, just like driving down the GW Parkway on a fall day past the Lincoln Memorial feels like a gift, just like playing chords while my sister sings a tune is a gift, just like being able to play the piano and master myself - briefly - is also a gift. That's how I feel, visiting the US again after so many years, like I'm being given all these great things - my childhood, maybe? - all over again.
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