The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, December 25, 2024

Notably: Beside the chestnuts roasting on a natural gas fire, the remains of yesterday’s fog, the loose-leaf tea brewing a replacement for the morning’s Brazilian coffee overload, the Muzaky crinkle of gift-wrapping accompanied by the occasional feign of surprise or delight, the irrepressible eruptions of joy the younger you are, the sullenness, for the sake of appearances, the more adolescent you are, the hourglass melancholy of diminishing auroras the older you are, remembering those “days sported by us, as if Time had not grown up himself yet, but were a child, too, and always at play.“ as you can see, David Copperfield is on the reading table and an assortment of cats is on the the Buddenbrooks, and there’s always this, as I note here year after year as a reassuring ritual: at midnight on Dec. 24 Columbia University’s WKCR launched its latest annual edition of Bachfest, started in the early 1980s, offering eight straight days and nights of Bach. The festival is hosted by a mixture of students who couldn’t for the life of them pronounce a word of German anymore than any of us could, and the occasional Bach scholar inclined to showoff complete mastery of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (the Bach catalogue that gave Bach works their familiar call letters, BWV). No doubt there are innumerable ways to spend the next week’s retreat from a world grown especially crabby and mean in the past year, but this is one of them. Even if you happen to dial in while one of Bach’s impenetrable organ pieces is playing from a chapel at Duke University. Give it a few minutes. Even the next organ piece will send you soaring–or anything from the Well tempered Clavier, or any of a thousand arias from his 250-odd surviving cantatas, or any movement from any of his concertos, his partitas, his French and English suites, his chorales. “Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont is a classic hors d’oeuvre,” the delightful Virgil Thompson wrote. “Nobody’s digestion was ever spoiled by it and no late comer has ever lost much by missing it.” I can’t think of a piece by Bach to which that would apply. I listen in order to feel as if the Big bang wasn’t in vain, and at times, I can hear cosmic purpose. Here’s the Bachfest link, accessible on any device, free.

—P.T.

 

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There were no trees for sale in our neighborhood because there was no one to buy them–and so the month of December, if it smelled at all, smelled of something a hissing alley cat had tugged from an overturned garbage can in somebody’s yard, and of supper heating on the stove of a flat whose steamy kitchen window was open a crack to let in air from the alleyway, and of the bursts of noxious coal gas spewed from the furnace chimneys, and of the pail of ashes dragged up from the cellar to be emptied outdoors over slippery patches of sidewalk. Compared with the fragrances of North Jersey’s damp spring and swampy Summer and unsettled, moody fall, the smells of a bitter-cold winter were almost unnoticeable or so I was convinced until I traveled downtown with Earl and saw the trees and took a whiff and discovered that, as with many things, for Christians December was otherwise. What with all of downtown strung with thousands of bulbs and the carolers singing and the Salvation Army band reveling and on every street corner another Santa Claus laughing, it was the month of the year when the heart of my birthplace was sublimely theirs and theirs alone. 

–From Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004).

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