'The Most Chimerical of Hopes'

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.” 

With age, such calamities proliferate. We start accumulating meaningful deaths. I don’t recall many, except JFK’s, having much impact on me when I was a kid. One measure of maturity may be periodically adding to the list of those we admire, whose departure leaves us sad or grieving. Someone too cool or sophisticated to have heroes, and thus never to feel their loss, has missed one of life’s rare privileges. The admission above was written by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias in the Winter 2020 issue of The Threepenny Review. In “The Distant Dead(1994)” he writes:

 

“As if it were not enough to have those closest to us die—a list that grows longer with the passing years—there’s the additional sadness of losing people we’ve never seen, with whom we’ve never talked or shared a joke, and whom we cannot, therefore, miss. And yet when we learn that such people have ceased to exist, or have gone over to the other side, we feel somehow more alone, bereft.”

 

Last week I watched a video of jazz pianist/composer Thelonious Monk dancing during a solo by his saxophonist Charlie Rouse. Monk was not performing. One senses he was deep in the music, moving to it, perhaps unable to remain still. I’ve watched the video several times since and I remembered learning of oMonk’s death in 1982 in the New York Times while waiting for a flight in the airport in Cleveland. My brother and I started listening to his music in the mid-Sixties. Several nights ago I had a dream in which Monk danced on a stage, solo this time. Marias writes:  

 

“Having felt somehow accompanied by their activities and by their very existence, we inevitably experience their death as something that has happened to us, as an almost personal drama. It’s not the same as when a friend dies, because those we merely admired from afar were never part of our daily life; it’s more like the death of someone we could always count on in absentia and from whom we could occasionally expect to receive pleasant news in the form of movies or recordings or books.”

 

Marias mentions two deaths I experienced the way he describes – Vladimir Nabokov and the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Nabokov’s I recently recounted. Gould was another enthusiasm my brother and I shared as kids. He died the same year as Monk. I was subbing for my editor at the newspaper when news of Gould’s death came across the teletype. Both artists remain essential figures in my personal pantheon. Marias acknowledges that Gould stopped performing in public in 1964:

 

“There was therefore not the slightest chance that I would ever see or hear him play live, and yet the news of his death somehow deprived me of a great hope; and as we all know, the most chimerical of hopes, precisely because they are chimerical, are always those we hold most dear.”

 

Marias died at age seventy on September 11, 2022.