Transfixing him with her gaze, Agamede says to him: 'But I have found
that love, Nicolas, is too often a thing of the imagination. A man
imagines the woman he thinks he sees, and imagines that he loves her.'
So few people can bear to be alone, she tells him. 'This weakness is
the cause of what they take to be love.' Belying their meaning, the
words are spoken in tones of great tenderness. The young man is
weakened by the scrutiny of Agamede, by her voice, by her bewitching
hauteur, the delicious glaze of her skin, the penumbra of candlelight
in her hair. He pretends to be considering what she has said, but
already he is losing his heart for a second time, or so he believes.
-- Jonathan Buckley. The Great Concert of the Night.
"February." New York: New York Review Books (2020).
The museum does not allow us to reclaim the past - the past is
irrecoverable. Hence the museum's pathos. The exhibits are like stars,
small pieces of light from distances that cannot be bridged.
...in a world of proliferating fakes and simulations, the museum is a
repository of the authentic. The things that it contains have an
enhanced authenticity, it might be said, by virtue of their having
endured....
The museum enjoins us to be humble: memento mori, it whispers to us.
Soon, very soon, your life will be reduced to fragments such as these,
a ruin, a miscellany of fragments from which the past can be
reconstituted only as a picture in which most of the space is blank....
The museum: an assemblage of objects removed from the flow of time,
protected from the depredations of utility. A nest of objects; a nest
is a place in which things are born.
-- Jonathan Buckley. The Great Concert of the Night.
"January", "March." New York: New York Review Books (2020).
And absurd hair. Like a bird's nest soaked in oil.
-- Jonathan Buckley. The Great Concert of the Night.
"October." New York: New York Review Books (2020).