“Right Away” Is Not “Now”

[Video: scenes of New York during the fall months, while Billie Holliday sings “Autumn in New York.” (Lyrics here.) Video assembled by Kevin O’Shea.]

From whiskey river:

Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar…. I was asking my friend about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition.

Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!

In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. “Tell me, Lobsang,” I said, “if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?”

My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, “How many human beings do you see?”

In a flash, I understood the meaning of the story and the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at that moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call “hungry ghosts.” They did not really exist. They were not really there. They were busy, they were in a hurry. They—like all of us—were obsessed with doing things right away. But right away is the opposite of now—the opposite of the lived present moment in which the passing of time no longer tyrannizes us. The hungry ghosts are starved for “more” time; but the more time we hungry ghosts get, the more time we “save,” the hungrier we become, the less we actually live. And I understood that it is not exactly more time, more days and years, that we are starved for, it is the present moment. “Right away” is not now. What a toxic illusion!

(Jacob Needleman [source (from the Introduction, by John Cleese, to the 2003 paperback edition)])

…not from whiskey river:

Written by a Belarusian immigrant named Vernon Duke, “Autumn in New York” practically debuted as a jazz standard. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting? Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city’s architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna, or April in Paris.

That’s the way we New Yorkers feel about fall. Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of gray autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there’s a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.  

Glittering crowds
And shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel—
They’re making me feel
I’m home.

It’s autumn in New York
That brings the promise of new love.

Yes, in the autumn of 1938 tens of thousands of New Yorkers would be falling under the spell of that song. Sitting in the jazz bars or the supper clubs, the worn and the well-to-do would be nodding their heads in smiling acknowledgment that the Belarusian immigrant had it right: that somehow, despite the coming of winter, autumn in New York promises an effervescent romance which makes one look to the Manhattan skyline with fresh eyes and feel: It’s good to live it again.

But still, you have to ask yourself: If it’s such an uplifting song, then why did Billie Holiday sing it so well?

(Amor Towles [source: here and here])

__________

P.S. There’s a really nice writeup about “Autumn in New York” here, at the Web site of the Philadelphia jazz/classical music radio station WRTI.