Jacob Needleman

[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.

[Image: “Combing Through the Cumulonimbus,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

24

Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are a part of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you.

(Marcus Aurelius, translated by Jacob Needleman and John Piazza [source])

I’m going to do something a little different — okay, a lot different — with this week’s whiskey river Fridays post. So, apologies in advance if you came here for more of what I usually do on Friday — it ain’t happening today! Instead, I’m going to share with you a dream I had this morning, because for better or worse the above quotation, per whiskey river, chimes so, so beautifully (in my own head, anyhow) with the dream.

(I should maybe add here that The Missus claims my dreams, and my memory of them, to be preternaturally detailed. I don’t know how true that it, but this is a pretty long account. For context, it may help to know that I left my old job at AT&T back in the early ’90s — and that I just spent a week in New Jersey, driving around to visit some old haunts. It was, well, a sort of dream trip.)

Here goes, presented as though I’m quoting someone else:

I’d been asked by somebody (?) to return to AT&T to work on a special project — was told to report to a former Bell Labs building on such-and-such a morning. My old AT&T friend and former project leader Jim was there, too, having likewise been called back.

The building was one story, and the hallway was crowded with old office equipment and boxes: filing cabinets, boxes of books, overhead projectors, etc. Jim and I were poking around in all this stuff looking for something we recognized… and coming up empty-handed.

Eventually a guy showed up whom Jim recognized but I didn’t. He was apparently of Japanese extraction, his hair dark with gray streaks at the temples, and he wore glasses. The two of them shook hands vigorously and I continued to poke around. Eventually they began looking at stuff together and found an old slide projector, loaded with slides; they set it up on a small pile of boxes and started looking through the slides in the attached carousel, talking and laughing. Since I didn’t know anything about the guy and didn’t know anything about the slides, I went around the corner to another hall.

By now a bunch of other people were in the hall, people I didn’t recognize. (Maybe they were already there when Jim and I arrived? Dunno.) They’d set up a couple of long folding tables and maybe a dozen-twenty folding chairs around it, and we were all clearly expected to choose a seat. Jim and the other guy joined us, Jim seated at a point around the middle of one side and the other fellow in the one seat at the far end. (It dawned on me that he — the other guy — must be the project leader. I’ll call him Joe.) I was sitting at a place a few seats from the opposite end, separated from Jim by maybe 3-4 seats to my right.

Everybody but me seemed to recognize one another and there was much excited chatter and occasional laughter although no one knew anything about the project. Things quieted down only when a door at the end of the hall opened and in came this older fellow in a three-piece suit who looked a bit like James Thurber. (In retrospect I think this must’ve been Al, who was my first district manager when I worked with Jim — he kinda looked like Thurber, too. I’ll call him Al, anyhow.) At his entry, the atmosphere changed dramatically; everyone seemed awed and excited to be in his presence. Joe, quite happy, shook Al’s hand — vigorously again — and Al himself smiled and nodded at several people as he looked around at those gathered there.

Then Joe began the meeting. He was speaking very quietly, and although the room (well, the hallway with the folding tables) was hushed I couldn’t hear him at all.

I excused myself, and slipped away down the hall.

One wall of the hall — the one that had been at my back while seated — was glass, with a door in it, and I went out the door. It was a broad, grassy atrium of some sort, almost a park, open to the sky. Some yards away was a large enclosure surrounded by a high, high chain-link fence. There was a door into the enclosure, too, but it consisted of not one but several — eight to ten! — sliding screen doors: to enter, you had to slide the outermost door all the way to your left, then the next door, then the one inside that, and so on. I got all the way through this multi-door, or whatever it was, but didn’t step into the enclosure — just looked. There was another chain-link enclosure attached to the far side of this one, and inside were about a half-dozen buffalo, grazing. (This was probably a flashback to a documentary we watched last night, on the American West.) I looked down at the grass in “my” enclosure and realized it was dotted with hundreds of, well, what’s the term? buffalo pats? Just as I realized this 3-4 little kids squeezed past me, laughing and squealing, into the enclosure. They ran to see the buffalo up close, apparently oblivious to what was underfoot. “Oh boy,” I thought, “Their parents are gonna be soooo happy to see THIS mess…” I turned around and went through the door, back into the building, back to my seat at the table.

The project meeting (or whatever it was) was still going on. Coffee and pastries had been delivered by then, and apparently the deal was that people were going around and introducing themselves to the group (although obviously many of them already knew one another).

My turn came up. I stood, cleared my throat, and said (approximately), “Well, actually I have no idea why I’m here. I’m not really a technical person anymore — I have no skills that most of you would recognize from your own work, because my skills are all from 40-50 years ago.”

Then Jim stood up and handed me a small, plain cardboard box, about 3-4 inches on a side and 6 inches long. (It wasn’t gift wrapped or anything.)

“John,” he said, “why don’t you tell us how that works?” He was grinning — not quite winking at me, but I could sense a wink behind the grin, like he knew I’d do a good job, whatever that turned out to be, with whatever was inside.

I opened the box. Inside it was an electrical fixture, nothing fancy or electronic, just a simple on-off wall switch. It included a dark brown switch plate. I looked up and around the walls and noticed that all the switches and outlets in the hallway were ivory-colored, and indeed fancier (dimmers and digital displays) — so clearly this was a mismatch, but one which could function in a pinch. (Metaphor much?) Fighting to keep a straight face, I took the switch out of the box and held it up so everybody could see it. “Ooooh,” I said, “I get it! You throw the switch and…” — pointing up at a light fixture in the ceiling — “and the steam comes out there!”

Everybody laughed and it seemed that although they didn’t know why I was there, either, and hadn’t expected this moment any more than I had, they genuinely appreciated the joke.

It’s probably best that I woke up around this time.

(JES, dream account 2023-09-22)

__________

Note for the pedantic: Yes, yes: I’m about 100% certain that the photo heading this post does, indeed, not depict a cumulonimbus cloud. But I sure did like the sound of that word attached to the rest of the post title.

“Right Away” Is Not “Now”

Clearing the Clouds from Your Mind