I nodded and returned with the box of supplies whose handle was worn down by years of use and slipped like a leather glove onto my hand. The soft light of noon now dappled the dark black wood of the piano. I took a clean cloth and the wood polish and removed the sheet music from the top of the piano. The lemony odor filled the room like the memory of a lost world.
Slowly, deliberately, I spread the polish in long, interlocking spirals, like the carved spirals in an ancient megalithic tomb, then, playfully, in swirling round dots and slanted beams, like the notes on the sheet music that were before me now.
Carefully, I brought the wood to a bright sheen and I could see Mr. Harrington's face gleaming in it, his glass of scotch absolutely still in his hand, his eyes filled with tears.
He sat down on the bench, placing his drink reluctantly on the piano top in front of him. He stared desolately for some moments, then with considerable effort he raised his hands above the eighty-eight keys to his life. They hung in the air like a matador's hands holding his cape high, daring the bull to charge. On his face was one of the strangest expressions I've ever seen in my life. It was as if he was peering at the ghost of Mozart glaring at him from the sheet music, admonishing him for his disrespect.
Then, he rubbed his eyes, and slowly his hands descended to the keys. Tenderly, he began to play, and out floated the first few sublime notes. The unfathomably beautiful music lifted across the room. I watched the professor play with utter affection, and something he had confided to me months before slowly came back to me.
“I would like to die with the word Mozart on my lips,” he said, “like Mahler did.”
I closed my eyes as the music seemed to hum in my swirling fingertips, and the loneliness of the hour turned inside out with something like joy enveloping the room.
I left him that way, a half-hour later, in a Mozart reverie, and never saw him again.
However, I've thought of him often. For the past twenty-five years it has been a ritual of mine to play Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto on my stereo every Sunday morning. With the first trilling of piano notes I am transported back to London and the sight of Mr. Harrington at his beloved Steinway, mustering up his courage, filling his aching heart with joy. His show of bravado that cold London morning all those years ago helped me understand that Sisyphus lives on. He lives on every time a struggling soul spurns despair and accepts the inevitable struggle of his or her life, and in so doing, creates what Camus unforgettably called “the hour of consciousness.”
Where many have seen grim retribution in Sisyphus trials, I see dogged resolution; where others have seen fatalism, I see silent joy. There is a celebration of freedom interwoven into this ancient tale, the celebration of having connived the burden of one's fate right into one's own hands.
“I see that man going back down,” Camus wrote, “with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.” Yet, by forging dignity out of his struggle he learned to say, like Sophocles' Oedipus, “Despite my ordeal, all is well.”
In mysterious ways like these I have slowly learned that you have to practice happiness, the way Mr. Harrington practiced Mozart. Every morning you go back to the bottom of the hill and start all over, one note at a time.
If Sisyphus Gould Sing
As exalting as the myth of Sisyphus might be, it can be a disturbing metaphor for courage, rebellion, or the creative struggle, even the loneliness that haunts the American dream.
Unless we delve still deeper.
It's after midnight. I look up at Coit Tower the very moment that the lights flicker off. It's time for my late-night walk around the neighborhood. I shuffle down the hill to Caffe Italia and order an espresso. While mulling over my manuscript I notice a young Italian couple, dressed to the nines, arguing outside on the sidewalk, tussling about what all young lovers argue about moments after the bars close. She is looking for love; he is looking at seduction. She's not convinced, and is going home alone. He's not defeated so easily, and smoothly grabs a half-dozen roses from the passing flowergirl who's working late tonight and slips her a fiver. But his date has already hailed a cab and is gone in a fingersnap, leaving him standing in the cold fog, flowers wilting in hand.
Dazed and disappointed, loverboy shuffles into the cafe and walks straight to the jukebox. In a thick accent, he asks the owners, Giuseppe and Daniella, “Got any classical music, you know, Sinatra?”
“An Italian café without Sinatra, you gotta be kidding me?” says Giuseppe, throwing me a “what are you gonna do” look.
The thwarted lover slips a fistful of dollar bills into the jukebox, takes off his Armani coat, and sits down at a table next to the window. Staring out at the mournful fog, he listens to the lovelorn saloon singer crooning his back-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss ballads. For the next hour The Voice, as he's often called in the neighborhood, spins out that old black magic called love: “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Only the Lonely,” “In the Wee Small Hours,” and the young Italian gazes outside, his heart breaking, slowly sipping his espresso, listening to the silky sounds. Eventually, he starts tapping his foot, snapping his fingers, as the moody hits keep on coming: “I Thought about You,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “Summer Wind.” I recall the words of the great music critic Murray Kempton, after Sinatra died: “He was just this little guy telling his story.” Three-verse stories, Kempton called the songs, that reflected an undying belief in eternal love, no matter how heartbroken you are.
By the time the jukebox plays the inevitable last selection, “One for the Road,” a smile is curling over the face of the smitten lover. When the last piano bar notes have faded, he throws his coat over his shoulder and strides out, inexplicably stronger, into the fogbound night.
The Healing Game
No doubt music is a healing force, even a “healing game,” in the words of the great bluesman John Lee Hooker. But once in a blue moon we can see evidence for its strength as myth as well. The night with the café jukebox is a prime example for me of the often-surprising sudden appearance of myth in ordinary life. It also illustrates what can happen when myths collide. That night showed me how the myth of love and romance can go bump in the night when it slams up against the great American myth of loneliness. But as often happens in myth, the question and the answer are found within the same image, the same story.
According to the ancients, Apollo graced Orpheus with a lyre, which he used to enchant wild beasts and make stones and trees moves.
When in doubt, go back, back to the beginning, say the Old Ones in the myths.
That is what I did when I got home the night around the café jukebox. Acting on sheer instinct I opened up my father's battered old copy of Homer's Odyssey, and sure enough, I discovered that Sisyphus had not been totally abandoned by the gods. He was granted one grand consolation. As he labored with his stone, he could hear exquisite music from the flute of Orpheus.
As Sisyphus in the ancient underworld found solace in the sweet sounds of Orpheus' flute, so too we are helped in mysterious ways by the power of mythic music, whether in the records of Miles Davis or the notes of the anonymous saxophonist playing on the lonely street corner or fire escape.
In his inimitable poetry, Homer wrote, “Poor Sisyphus could hear the charming sounds that ravished his ear.”
Imagine the implications of that line. The divine detail is subtly placed. This is no mere coincidence. What it reveals to me is that we can more easily bear our burden if we listen closely for the music of life all around us, the music that is there for the listening, for the solace, for the triumph over our troubles.
For as long as we know music has healed mind, body, and