Nicholas Momurray: Places Is there a single defining moment in a life? A moment, an event that summarizes all that's gone before and that implies all that's to come? That's the question I've been pondering. And here is my answer, my biography reduced to one moment. I am sitting alone at one of the outdoor tables of the Café Florian In St. Mark's Square in Venice. It is a fine late April day. On the table beside my Diet Coke is my DayRunner, open to a page of notes. The last note, dated the evening before, reads: "Monteverdi, like Bach and all the others, heard what he saw. Blake, to his and our eternal confusion, saw what he knew. Lao-Tze, before all their times, was the world's first absolutely dead-pan sit-down comedian, who fed straight lines to himself and left the punchlines for us to work out." I'm re-reading this ponderous jotting when I look up and see a young, twenty-something German (dark hair but his stiff bearing and somber mien give him away) strolling across the plaza toward my group of tables. The heat from the stones causes his figure to shimmer slightly. I squint my eyes and it is the young Thomas Mann walking again toward his verbose fate. I had just the night before re-read "Death in Venice." And now here I am seeing the ghost of the author... I look around. Tadzios are everywhere. (The careless extravagance of nature extends from flowers to fish to people, doesn't it.) Poor Thomas. I look back, but he's gone. Did I see him? The plaza is empty except for pigeons and tourists. I close my DayRunner, snap the strap, take a sip of Diet Coke, and light a Carlton 120. |
