Hope you’re feeing better, mi vida, and that you’re up and getting ready for Sheffield. Given that my feelings for you lie somewhere between an Oscar Hammerstein lyric and an Iris Murdoch story, I want to share with you 1) the most beautiful Kern-Hammerstein song of them all which, of course, you’d be familiar with; and 2) an early passage from my second favorite comic novelist’s 15th novel, The Black Prince (Viking, 1973) before everybody goes to hell and—well, I won’t give it away:

…[I]t is one of the peculiarities, perhaps one of the blessings, of this planet that anyone can experience this transformation of the world. Also, anyone can be its object. … The foreverness of real love is one of the reasons why even unrequited love is a source of joy. The human soul craves for the eternal of which, apart from rare mysteries of religion, only love and art can give a glimpse. … Love brings with it also a vision of selflessness. How right Plato was to think that, embracing a lovely boy, he was on the road to the Good. I say a vision of selflessness, because our mixed nature readily degrades the purity of any aspiration. But such insight, even intermittent, even momentary, is a privilege and can be of permanent value because of the intensity with which it visits us. Ah, even once, to will another rather than oneself! Why could we not make of this revelation a lever by which to lift the world? Why cannot this release from self provide a foothold in a new place which we can then colonize and enlarge until at last we will all that is not ourselves? That was Plato’s dream. It is not impossible.

John in Lucky Silver TieAbove John’s dear face: Tony Bennett with Bill Charlap on the piano in a thrilling rendition, from 2015, of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “All the Things You Are”.

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