One
of modernity’s minor horrors: the car alarm. Some twenty years ago, while
helping a friend move from her apartment in Albany, N.Y., I leaned against a
car parked near the rental truck, and my touch set off a blast of hysterical ambulance
shrieks. I jumped like one of Galvani’s frogs, expecting my first heart attack.
The car in question was no prize – a Toyota of the same model and year I was
driving, but with a drabber paint job. Who would bother stealing such a crate?
That was my introduction to a new expression of vanity. Ned Rorem shares my
aversion. In Lies: A Diary 1986-1999
(Counterpoint, 2000), the first volume I have read of his many-volumed diary,
is an entry dated March 23, 1997. Rorem imagines a peculiarly modern urban indignity:
“The
last sounds he heard as he lay dying were the throb-throb of the garbage truck
down in the street, and the mindless unstoppable screech of a car alarm set off
by the truck’s vibration.”
A
composer’s vision of hell. One year and twenty-six pages later, on March 27,
1998, he writes:
“A
dream as complex as all of Tolstoy transpires in a millisecond, into which the
harm of car alarms intrudes and wakens you. I’ve not had a good night’s sleep
in thirty years. The astronaut dreams he is walking on the moon.”
And
another dream-like torment, on April 10, 1995:
“In
the dead of night the phone rings, but no one’s there. Then rings again, while
car alarms clang incessantly throughout our puritan city.”
1 comment:
Worse than the last sounds imagined by Ned Rorem are the last sounds heard by probably millions over the last half-century: the inane droning from a television in a hospital room.
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