The City and the Country no.13 – August 6 2014

My Wednesday, as ever, begins with a journey to Columbus Circle, to breakfast with Linda, my dear agent, and her dog, Princess (currently being taken for walks in a stroller, due to a bad leg). Today there’s no follow-up appointment on the Upper West Side with my no less dear composer-colleague, who is attending to elderly parents. I descend from coffee with Linda to where the huge great absurd basaltic statue of a naked man occupies the lobby of the the Time Warner Building, a naked man with a tiny organ (decorously not shown here) and a tiny head. The tiny head I can understand, since we are clearly not developing intellectually, as a species.

So instead of music with Jimmy, as we continue with our Hollywood musical, I sat for a while in Olmsted’s majestic Central Park, which I’ve been visiting for 65 years – daily at first between 1949 and ’52, when my school, the French Lycee, sent us there every morning (the park was at the end of our block). Its granite outcroppings, as I thought of the star-dusted reefs of rock that surge up all across the park and in upper Manhattan, mica-flecked as if from some celestial sea, have appeared in my dreams ever since. Technically this bedrock is glaciated schist, the ground-down remains of a mountain range a billion years old. Now the mountain range is a series of little bumps. But it’s still strong enough to hold up Manhattan.