"The Man without Qualities" by Robert Musil (1952?)

It is a novel about a different kind of people waiting for Godot. The novel asserts that a civilization without small talk is possible. More defines a man than what he ate for lunch.

Humans turn to big questions, not featured in small talk, out of craving for simple answers. Non-existence of simple answers is easier to verify in small questions than big ones. Humans turn to big questions also in order to explain and thus predict environment. Simple answers are easy to live by and to remember.

Big questions do not feature in a small talk, defined as an exchange in which a speaker expects his interlocutor's response. Small talk about big questions is confined to conversations of co-religionists or patriots. No new ideas emerge from such conversations.

In the novel, individuals take time off (of the time-off, for some) in order to discover a simple idea that would give purpose to their nation and, by extension---they hope---to them. The pursuit can be counteproductive. No cell in a flower is charged with improving the functioning of the entire plant. Nonetheless, the plant evolves, often for the better. Still, the pursuit of a big idea can be fruitful, as it accelerates the mutation of ideas, as long as no mutated idea is malicious enough to annihilate the society.

Literally and by example, the novel warns one against getting lost in details. Beauty is secured by pruning the inessential and the ugly. The illusion of causation (and hence of control) is gained by linearly arranging the events and by living them linearly, with only the briefest sojourns in the past or future. That is, life must be lived as a novel. A novel, a product of an inevitably systematizing mind, delivers linearity and thus gratifies.

Robert Musil's characters grope for a structured thought. The strongest overcome the arresting urge to drown themselves in contemplating the lofty, a symptom of perfectionism. Instead, they summon (or profess) the courage to proceed with the essential mundane.

In the novel, ladies worship the protagonist, Ulrich. They are attracted to him by his detachment and by the author's wistful thinking.

High Sierra (1941)

Poverty cripples all but the strongest. It deprives one of choices that would enable one to discover one's proclivities and shape them into a character. Relative poverty hurts most, as the affluent buy some of the freedom that could have been available to the impoverished. The impoverished can gain freedom by hard work and luck, or by force and luck. A prosperous society channels force into work and prevents extreme poverty due to bad luck, thus nurturing character. The perils of riches are left unexplored by this B-movie.

Garth Fagan Dance

(Nazareth College Arts Center, 5 December 2009)

In a good dance number, music is in the mind of the viewer, certainly not conspicuously on the mind of the dancer. Music is what a dancer's mood evokes, not what shocks the dancer into his next move. It is this subordination of music to characters that makes a jazz band engaging to watch, and it is the failure to subordinate that makes watching a symphony orchestra dull unless one's gaze is rested on the conductor.

Garth Fagan's dancers stretch, interpret music, or communicate with an entity that delights in broken lines and abrupt movements, but they communicate reluctantly with each other. When they do communicate with each other, they are at their best, as in "Translation Transition." There, music is simple and repetitive enough not to dominate the understated choreography; the characters emerge.

Mr Fagan's sense of timing and visual composition is precise, even cinematic. It should be employed to tell the dancers' story, not the composer's.