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Friday, October 14, 2005
I remembered, today... ...a passage from a lesser known Wayne Booth book (Booth died a few days ago), Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (note cool cover - I want to be sitting at that table!) which I'd always found moving: It is Easter time, 1971, and I am sitting in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, listening to Bach's St. Matthew Passion. After the final grand chorus, climaxing more than three hours of listening, I sit in the silence - we have been asked not to applaud - with tears in my eyes. As I recover what we call my "self" slightly, I become aware that my wife on one side and my sixteen-year-old daughter on the other are weeping too, and that in fact handkerchiefs are visibly and audibly at work all over the hall. As we get up to leave, I meet a friend who is ordinarily loquacious; he lowers his reddened eyes and does not speak. Later in the corridor, another friend, ordinarily fluent, says, "That was really..." and bogs down, unable to say what it was, really. |