'The Distant Pageant of the World'

For only the second time since the shutdown I took an aimless drive around the city. No surprises. Traffic was sparse. I saw more shuttered doors and empty parking lots. More people were wearing masks. Fewer masks were white and more were colored or patterned. Delft blue seems popular. I brought along a CD of Aaron Copland’s music performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Just as there is comfort food, his “Quiet City” is comfort music. I didn’t at first make the obvious connection between Copland’s title and Houston under stay-at-home orders, but it is quiet out there. I stopped at an empty park and heard no children or boomboxes, just a whisper in the pines and a lone mockingbird.

I’m weathering the pandemic better than many. More time to read and write and listen to music. I watched John Ford's My Darling Clementine again the other night and enjoyed the scene in the saloon when Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) asks the bartender (J. Farrell MacDonald), “Mac, you ever been in love?" and Mac replies, “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”

In the car, hygienically sealed behind steel and glass, I watched the world pass through the windows. Part of the reason I became a newspaper reporter, I now understand, is that by temperament I’m an observer, not a participant and not a busybody. I watch the fray and don’t get involved -- externally. In his essay “Fenestralia” (Mainly on the Air, 1957), Max Beerbohm’s meditation on windows, he writes: “From some windows one can gaze and be rapt at any hour of the day, even though no human being is to be seen from them.” That has been the case on our cul-de-sac for the last month or so. Like George Santayana, Beerbohm is one of nature’s spectators – observant, cool, aloof – which is not the same as indifferent. In “Diminuendo” (The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896) he writes:

“I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look forth and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world. Humanity will range itself in the column of my morning paper. No pulse of life will escape me. The strife of politics, the intriguing of courts, the wreck of great vessels, wars, dramas, earthquakes, national griefs or joys; the strange sequels to divorces, even, and the mysterious suicides of land-agents at Ipswich -- in all such phenomena I shall steep my exhaurient mind.”