… Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Leonard Bernstein spent leisure time there, and their stories are the stuff of local legend.

As Indiana University recreates Leonard Bernstein’s workroom, UD adds another name to the KW pantheon.

From a long essay about Bernstein:

“I have always loved words fully as much as musical notes; I find the same joys of ambiguity, structural suspense, anagrammatic play and grace of phrasing in both.” As a child, he and friend Eddie Ryback invented their own language (“Rybernian,” an amalgam of their names) and throughout his life Bernstein devoured crossword puzzles and loved to play verbal word-games.

… [I]n 1973 …he was invited to deliver a series of six lectures [at Harvard]. Bernstein threw himself into the project, devoting nearly two years to their preparation. In them, he used equal helpings of linguistic theory, musicology and mysticism to demonstrate that all musical expression, from childish taunts to Mahler adagios, are an integral part of a unified system of universal communication.

At turns colloquial and at others bafflingly dense, the lectures were entitled “The Unanswered Question,” in reference to the title of one of Bernstein’s favorite works, Charles Ives’s visionary tone poem which traces man’s unfulfilled quest for meaning throughout his existence… [In the Ives,] a trumpet incessantly propounds an unchanging “question” to which flutes posit increasingly complex and confounding answers, all over an unchanging background of soothing strings representing the unaffected eternity of the indifferent universe. Bernstein concluded the lectures on a note of touching optimism: “The answer to the question, although I forget what it is, is ‘yes’.”

Which reminds UD of a comment Richard Wilbur, for decades a Key West winter resident, made recently to an interviewer:

“To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy [and that] the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith…”