‘Costa Concordia’ Captain Says He Had No Choice but to Abandon Ship

ROME -- A profound sense of duty compelled Francesco Schettino to abandon his sinking cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, the ship’s captain told Italian authorities this morning, and his actions saved countless tiny, almost completely invisible lives.

Schettino has been criticized for allegedly fleeing the accident, last Friday, long before many passengers and other crew members. It is also alleged that he refused to return to the ship after being ordered to do so by the Italian coast guard; according to some sources, he either did not participate at all in the rescue effort or else hampered efforts by others.

“It was my duty as captain to oversee the evacuation and rescue of the most vulnerable passengers on board the Costa Concordia,” Schettino is said to have told investigators. “The Puffi are a tiny people who would have been crushed by others in the rush for the lifeboats. What is more, only I have the ability to see them. Had I abandoned them, they surely would have died, and casualties from this regrettable accident would have been much, much higher.”

Schettino “refuses to be the Gargamella in this case.”

Aboard the ship, the Puffi, tiny blue people who wear white stockings and caps, were mostly elderly (Grande Puffo), women (Puffetta), children (Puffo Bambino), or so incredibly brainy or handy that Schettino dared not leave them behind (Puffo Quattrocchi, Puffo Inventore). “Survivors of the wreck would need the Puffi skills these Puffi could provide,” Schettino reportedly said.

“You cannot imagine how difficult it was,” Schettino told Italian authorities, describing what he called a “Puffi’s Choice” as to “who would escape and who would stay to fight for their Puffi lives. But it was my duty as captain to act as I did.”

Among the disaster’s unreported casualties, Schettino said, were Puffo Goloso, Puffo Maldestro, and Puffo Brontolone, all of whom are missing and believed smurfed.

“I can understand that, since nobody else could see the lives I was saving, it may have appeared that I was a foolish coward, thinking only of myself. This is simply not the case.”

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Hamilton’s ‘Anthony Burns’

The book’s cover features an illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon, whose work enhanced Hamilton’s The People Could Fly
so eloquently.

Continuing my exploration of the work of the late author Virginia Hamilton, and doing so in the most haphazard way, I have stumbled across a lovely book, from 1988, that is a compendium of many of the best qualities that made her such a compelling writer. Not the least of these is, it’s a helluva good story, excitingly told.

Aimed I think at high-school kids and those junior-high students who are strong readers, Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave reads like historical fiction: with its Boston setting, roiling political background, and its hero with a crippled hand, it may even recall that landmark of the genre, Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. But it’s all true, as Hamilton makes clear with a thoughtful afterword and an extensive bibliography.

Hamilton shows us Burns, a young man who finds himself the center of a riot in 1854. As is sometimes the case with such figures, Burns is de facto a passive figure during the most dramatic event of his life, since he’s being held prisoner (in shackles and under heavy guard) at the very moment he’s a cause célèbre. But creating passive heroes is not what Hamilton is about.

And so she shows us Burns’ inner thoughts, active even as he’s confined and facing the prospect of forcible return to his master in Virginia: Anthony retreats within himself, reliving his past in vivid flashback sequences, making of the narrative a counterpane of past and present. This technique makes absolute sense, chiming as it does with what we know about survivors of prison camps and other such ordeals. (Hamilton doesn’t say whether any of the real-life Burns’ writings or statements corroborated her narrative approach, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)

The book is full of smart psychology, and Hamilton shows us, for example, what a mixed blessing is Anthony’s as a very young boy, because he’s the special favorite of John Suttle, the man who owns him (and who cannot stop himself from repeating that Anthony is his property). Yes, Anthony gets somewhat better treatment than the other slaves, but this in turn exposes him to rumors and resentment from whites and blacks alike on the plantation. Anthony is still a slave, and even John Suttle’s affection can’t be relied on: he takes Anthony on pony rides, yes, but then knocks him off the saddle to the ground. The boy cannot — must not — complain.

Hamilton doesn’t need to spell out her message: there was no such thing as comfortable or “nice” slavery, nor any way to make the condition tolerable, and we understand why young Anthony feels the need to escape. Sure, some of his jobs are cushier than others; he never works in the fields, though he does plenty of manual labor, including in a sawmill, where a white man’s negligence leads to the accident that cripples 13-year-old Anthony’s hand. Other slaves have it worse, but that doesn’t make his situation better.

And so, as a man, Anthony retreats to his memories not out of sentimentality but out of pride: his memories are his own, and no one can take them from him: that is what makes them a source of comfort.

You see what an astute observer of psychology — of the human spirit — Virginia Hamilton could be. The rest of the book is full of comparable insights and intriguing characterizations. And if Anthony isn’t the most active participant in the courtroom drama, he remains the heart of the story.

Drawing on memoirs and testimony, Hamilton makes those trial scenes very suspenseful (what a great movie this story would make!), and it’s another mark of her method that she doesn’t condescend: legal terms are used, with the apparent presumption that her readers are smart enough to look ’em up if they don’t know ’em already.

Along similar lines, you don’t have to read the appended historical texts (including not only the works in that bibliography but also excerpts from the Fugitive Slave Act, nightmarish), but you can: as with The People Could Fly, Hamilton isn’t merely telling (or spoon-feeding) stories, she’s giving her readers the tools they need to learn and to make the stories their own. Fascinating.

She does keep you guessing, though. Two of the scenes that you expect to play on a grand scale are kept brief, remarkably non-violent, and really rather understated: the sawmill accident and the riot itself. It’s clever strategy, because you wind up paying closer attention to other, subtler or more obscure points in the plot: in a way, Hamilton knows that your imagination has filled in the big scenes, so she doesn’t have to.

And so it’s not only for the stories — which she has uncovered with such thoughtful care — that I’m returning to Virginia Hamilton’s books. It’s for the way she goes about her business, and for the sense she gives me that I know her now, though I never met her. With each book, she’s shared a bit of her soul with me.

Virginia Hamilton’s page at Amazon.com can be found here.

Virginia Hamilton’s page at Scholastic Books can be found here.

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Streep’s ‘The Iron Lady’

Another Oscar would go so nicely
next to the Golden Globes on the mantel.

Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, an unconventional biopic about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played by Meryl Streep), is about the qualities of leadership, and is aimed at those audiences who buy books on “Leadership” and who quote Winston Churchill at parties… no, start over.

The Iron Lady is an unconventional love story that proves that behind every great woman, there is a great man (Harry Lloyd as the younger Denis Thatcher, Jim Broadbent as the older)… no, start over.

The Iron Lady is a Joan Crawford movie in modern dress, about the personal costs of a woman’s career, as Thatcher neglects her children and her husband recedes into the background, leaving her alone….

Maybe The Iron Lady is about the importance of upholding principle… no, not really.

No matter how this picture looks when it is cropped, these gentlemen are not giving Margaret Thatcher a Nazi salute.

The Iron Lady is a disease-of-the-week movie about senile dementia, which brings low even the mightiest…. The Iron Lady is a dreamplay about memory, which holds even the departed close to heart….

Well, to tell the truth, I had no idea what The Iron Lady was about, after sitting through a 104-minute movie that seems much longer than it is. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan stubbornly, almost courageously refuse to take a point of view about anything in the picture.

At least The Iron Lady is absolutely and categorically not about politics. And this is why it may have been perfectly all right for me to see it on Martin Luther King Day, though the subjects of movie and holiday almost surely would have clashed in life. (Can you imagine the protest marches Dr. King might’ve led against Thatcher’s treatment of the coal miners?)

Be patient, keep a stiff upper lip, and the real subject of the picture will come to me, I assure you.
But perhaps you’d better pour yourself a cup of tea while you wait.

Ultimately, The Iron Lady is about Meryl Streep, who portrays Margaret Thatcher in middle and old age and who is the whole excuse for the exercise. She gives a remarkable performance, a celebration of a powerful woman who is either Margaret Thatcher or Meryl Streep herself, and it really doesn’t matter which.

Watching her, Americans will regret that we cannot confer knighthoods upon our actors, as the English do. Perhaps there are others who could be made to look and sound more like Margaret Thatcher (in Britain she’s usually mimicked by men), and surely there are plenty of actresses who are more British. But when the question of authority comes up at one point in the film, you think, “Aha! That’s it — that’s why Dame Meryl is the only actress today who could give this performance — she has authority.”

Because then The Iron Lady is a movie about Dame Meryl Streep, the filmmakers are keenly interested in humanizing Margaret Thatcher, because, no matter how evil you think Thatcher is (and some people do hold strong opinions), Dame Meryl does not play inhuman characters: even Miranda Priestley turned out to have an inner life.

Behind every great woman: Jim Broadbent plays Denis Thatcher as an older man, and also as a deceased man.

Here, humanizing Margaret Thatcher is done primarily through scenes depicting her with husband Denis, both before and after his death, and he turns out to be an entirely adorable fellow indeed, a gentle clown, as patient with Margaret as he is proud of her.

Just in case this wasn’t enough humanity for you, Phyllida Lloyd has cast Jim Broadbent as Denis. Not only is Broadbent very good at such roles, having played a lot of them, but he has also been amassing quite a reserve of audience affection for himself personally, so that we’re inclined to think he’s sweet no matter what he’s doing. Harry Lloyd, as the young Denis, is even more charming and probably too good-looking ever to turn into Jim Broadbent, but we don’t mind.

A great deal of work is crammed into very few scenes for Alexandra Roach, who plays young Margaret. It’s up to her to convey Thatcher’s pain at being snubbed by male chauvinists and upper-class twits; it’s also up to her to convey Thatcher’s worship of her father and terror that she’ll turn out like her own Mum.

The sweetest scene in the picture: Young Denis (Harry Lloyd) proposes to Young Margaret (Alexandra Roach).

And yet, in a curious reflection of the scenes in which Thatcher is carefully trained and groomed for higher office, it’s hard to take this movie’s Thatcher seriously until she turns into Meryl Streep. Roach isn’t supposed to have authority, of course, but because she doesn’t, we’re just biding our time until Dame Meryl returns.

In the realm of politics, everyone else gets short shrift with the possible exception of Geoffrey Howe (played by Anthony Head), who has a lot of screen time if not many lines. Richard E. Grant is instantly recognizable as Richard E. Grant, not so much as the politician he plays, but it doesn’t matter because he vanishes almost immediately. As for the actor who plays John Major — well, you assume he’s John Major, because the resemblance is uncanny, but in truth he never opens his mouth, and really you’re just guessing.

For a long time, Dame Meryl was the prime contender for the film of Evita. Watching this picture, I saw definite clues as to how she would have played Señora Perón.
I also wished Iron Lady were a musical.

Did Thatcher save Britain? Was her idea of Britain worth the suffering she inflicted? The movie does in fact raise these questions, but never gets around to answering them.

Does Dame Meryl save the picture? Yes. Does Phyllida Lloyd inflict too much suffering, with her meandering moviemaking? Yes. (And dear Heaven, Lloyd already made Mamma Mia! You don’t get many more free passes after a crime like that.)

You will not really learn much about Margaret Thatcher’s life, and still less about your own, from watching The Iron Lady. But you will see a very fine actress in a very challenging role, one that is almost certain to win her another Oscar.

If that’s your idea of a good time, don’t let me stop you.
Frankly, next time I might prefer to see her play Batman.

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Please Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington

Christina Haag as Viola, with Adrian Hernandez as the Sea Captain.
Twelfth Night, Production Workshop, Brown University, 1982.
Directed by Robin Saex Garbose.

Actors aren’t like other people; they’re always acting. So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway, and to some it’s quite handy.

So you broke up with your girlfriend? Blame it on her acting talent! “Oh, you know, she’s an actress,” you can say; “She was always changing, never herself, so artificial, constantly pretending. I never knew where I stood with her, and I couldn’t tell what she was really thinking.”

Nobody will call you on this — nobody will dare to suggest that maybe you didn’t understand her because you’re not terribly perceptive, or that you’re certainly not as well connected to your emotions as any decent actress really must be to hers (even to the point of excess). And rest assured that nobody will tell you that you didn’t deserve a girl like her in the first place. So long as you speak in truisms universally accepted, you can delude yourself forever.

Ann Harada as Christmas Eve

Returning to New York and reuniting with friends who just happen to be actresses, I have found reassurance in the very unchangeable nature of their changing art. This isn’t to say that they aren’t better actresses now than when I knew them in college, but that — contrary to what people say — they are less changed in spirit, and perhaps more authentic, than many other women of my acquaintance.

Where is the girl I used to know? She’s right here, doing what she has always done. And that makes everything seem somehow right.

Jennifer Van Dyck, with Charles Busch in The Divine Sister

Christina Haag has been getting so much attention as a writer — not least for Come to the Edge, her tender account of her love affair with John F. Kennedy, Jr., which has just been released in paperback. Indeed, the fact that she writes so beautifully came as something of a revelation to me, and if she ever turns to fiction, I intend to become jealous and quite unpleasant about it.

But I knew Christina first as an actress, and so it was a providential gift to find her onstage again, a few months ago in New York, in Sharyn Rothstein’s drama, The Invested. She portrayed a driven financier with such natural grace that she had me believing that she might have succeeded on Wall Street, too, in real life. (Christina quickly but gently disabused me of that notion after the show.)

Christina Haag in Sharyn Rothstein’s The Invested
New York, 2011

Before The Invested, I hadn’t seen Christina in something like 20 years. She’s a grownup now, and yet she’s still the poised, almost ethereally beautiful girl I used to know. When our friend Robin Saex Garbose directed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Brown, I was Christina’s Orsino, and playing opposite her really raised my game. Looking into her eyes, I wanted to be the Orsino she imagined.

She’s the last girl I ever kissed onstage: I guess it’s just as well that I quit while I was ahead.

Christina as Viola, with WVM as Orsino.

There’s a lot to be said for the fulfillment of a promise, and in seeing a woman do what she was meant to do, your own destiny may seem more secure. Just last night, I missed hearing Ann Harada performing the songs of William Finn in Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series, darn it, but I’ve had the joyful experience of seeing Ann a few times elsewhere recently, including her annual tour-de-force, Christmas Eve with Christmas Eve.

For the moment, let me emphasize that Ann throws her Christmas Eve revues together in only a few weeks, with minimal rehearsal. Her instincts, her training and experience, her talent and her prowess as a performer are such that she can pull off such feats of skill and daring, where any mortal woman might fail. What’s more, her heart (the shows benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS) makes the effort necessary to her. But even as a girl, in musical comedies at Faunce House, Ann was signaling already that some day she’d be capable of exactly this magic.

Art isn’t easy: Ann Harada with WVM,
following December’s annual Christmas Eve extravaganza.
She pours herself into these performances, as you can see.
Photo by Anne Balcer©

I barely suspected that I’d see Jennifer Van Dyck when I went to Charles Busch’s farce, The Divine Sister, in 2010 — but there she was. Even though she was playing (alternately) a little boy and an older woman, she, too, was entirely the girl I remembered: lovely and funny and smart. In conversation, I always had the feeling that she was three or four lines ahead of me in the dialogue, as if she had privileged access to the full script, whereas I was just reading sides. Her mind works that quickly — and her wit shines through when she’s onstage, just as it always did.

Now Jennifer is appearing in a new play, Cate Ryan’s The Picture Box, with the Negro Ensemble Company, at the Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row through January 29. Promising the story of a black couple’s relationship with the daughter of the white family they work for, the play is evoking memories of my own relationship with Bessie Pullam, even before I see the show. I’m looking forward to it. (For more information, click here.)

Jennifer Van Dyck

I’m conscious of context here. It’s possible, for example, that actresses without the brains and accomplishment to get into Brown aren’t as estimable as these three women. It’s possible — indeed, probable — that Christina, Ann, and Jennifer would be just as extraordinary if they’d studied molecular biology or worked in real estate. And yet the combination of circumstances here strikes me as resistant to debate — and worthy of celebration.

In a too-changing world, these women are not merely stage stars but pole stars, and we’d be fools not to be guided by them. The next time you meet an actress, consider yourself lucky.

Christina as Viola, with Andrew Weems as Malvolio.

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Kennst du das Buch?

An illustration from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister:
She’s been singing while the old guy plays the harp and the young guy listens, and that’s about as much as I can tell you about the story, for now.

To say that I’m excited about Susan Graham’s recital tour (now underway and arriving at New York’s Carnegie Hall on February 1, with the heroic Malcolm Martineau at the piano) would be an understatement of a sort to which I am not prone when Susan is the subject. By far the bulk of the program is given over to material Susan hadn’t sung before opening night (in Québec), including the first number in Russian she has ever performed in public — because if there’s one thing Susan is bad at, it’s coasting.

Perhaps most intriguing is a set of five songs, by five composers, inspired by the character Mignon, from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjare (usually translated as “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”). An appealing character, apparently, Mignon herself sings in the novel, and she inspired several 19th-century composers, notably with “Kennst du das Land?” (“Do you know the country?”), which everybody from Franz Schubert to our dear contemporary, Mark Adamo, has set. Ambroise Thomas wrote an entire opera on Wilhelm Meister, and named it after Mignon.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I’ve never read Wilhelm Meister. I daresay that Susan could sing the tax code in Chinese and still manage to connect with me on a spiritual level — but why not read the book? I had no answer to that question, and so I’ve loaded it onto my Kindle.

Susan Graham in recital, Québec, January 6, 2012

I’ll update you on my progress, and I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with Goethe, of whose work I know only two other monuments: Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther. (Those books inspired two of Susan’s most distinguished stage roles, Marguerite in Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust and Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther.)

With a view primarily to impressing the admissions officers of Harvard College, I read Faust in a dual-language edition; the stunt didn’t work, and while I remember the framework, I don’t remember the brushstrokes, as it were: neither German nor English text stuck in my head.

Werther I read in English, but at a time when an ex-girlfriend was about to marry. I was homeless at the time, sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and I dreamt — surely as Werther himself must have done, when Lotte married Albert — that I could hear the happy couple making love in the night. Let’s just say that I understand why Goethe’s novel provoked a rash of sympathetic suicides when it was first published.

Susan as Massenet’s Charlotte, with Rolando Villazón as Werther.
I was lucky enough to see them in this production
in Paris a few years ago.

Will Wilhelm Meister enhance my appreciation of Susan’s performance? There’s only one way to find out. But as I move forward, I’m reminded of something Beverly Sills said during my first-ever interview, backstage in her dressing-room in Dallas. “You have to do your homework,” she said about opera-going.

In those days, she was especially right. We had no projected titles in those days, children, and so we had to read the libretto before we went to the theater, or else risk getting hopelessly lost in the flow of foreign languages. At the very least, we had to read a plot synopsis, so that we understood that Alfredo was Violetta’s boyfriend, and not her dad or some guy she picked up on the street.

Nowadays it’s easier, and even I sometimes go to a show without having studied up on it. But in “winging it,” I’ve lost something, I know. By doing my “homework” for the opera, I wound up learning a lot — and not least that there existed a great wide world beyond the horizons I could see from where I stood.

Susan herself has spoken eloquently about listening to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoons and dreaming of that wider world. Now it’s she who points out new horizons to the people who are lucky enough to hear her. I am one among them, and I am glad of it.

Okay. Back to my homework.

Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau

January 14, 2012: Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall at Univesity of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

January 18, 2012: CSU Northridge, Valley Performing
Arts Center, Northridge, CA

January 22, 2012: Spivey Hall, Morrow, GA

January 28, 2012: Koerner Hall at Telus Centre, Toronto, ON

February 1, 2012: Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

February 4, 2012: Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Washington, DC

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In Praise of the Avid Dilettante

Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, in one of the greatest performances
I have ever seen on television.

In reflecting further on Susanne Mentzer’s Huffington Post column and my essay from yesterday, I returned to an observation I’ve been mulling over for some time: namely, there is a diametrical opposite to the sort of people who never go to galleries or concerts. And I have come up with a gang of unlikely role models.

Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp are the central characters in a series of comic novels by E.F. Benson. Ordinarily I wouldn’t suggest them as role models to anybody, because they’re truly awful people — deliciously so, I hasten to add — backstabbing busybodies who plot against one another in order to achieve and maintain social dominance in the tiny seaside village where they live.*

Prunella Scales (at left, fondly remembered as Sibyl Fawlty)
played Elizabeth Mapp in the TV adaptation.
She’s seen here with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia.

Naturally, then, these characters don’t seek out art for the right reasons. If they sketch or paint watercolors, it is primarily to win prizes and to defeat rivals. If they play piano, it is primarily to monopolize the attention of dinner guests. If they attend an opera, it is primarily to enjoy the company of a famous singer, after the show, and if they speak Italian, it is entirely to show off.

Art for Mapp and Lucia is a weapon to be used in their constant social warfare. They’re both intelligent, upper-class women with no more productive use of their time, and who knows whether, if they had jobs of some sort, they’d be quite so avid in their pursuit of culture. They’re cheats, too. For example, when Lucia reads Ancient Greek, she resorts to dual-language editions, and her Italian is mostly sham (leading to one of the novels’ most famous episodes).

Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie Pillson, Lucia’s closest
(and most effeminate) friend.

And yet these characters do have cultivation. Whether they practice the arts well or poorly is — for the purposes of this discussion — almost irrelevant. They do sketch. They do play piano. They put on theatricals and recite poetry. They do speak at least a bit of a few foreign languages. And they do expose themselves to other people’s art, as well, even if they don’t quite understand (or even like) modern music and painting.

Which is to say that Mapp, Lucia, and their friends are doing exactly what the rest of us ought to be doing. Yes, they’re doing these things for the wrong reasons, but how many of the rest of us, lo these decades later, could do as much? Maybe they’re not great artists, but they keep the engines humming for themselves and for everyone else.

Benson’s characters become quite admirable, when viewed in this context. You wouldn’t have to force Mapp or Lucia to go to a museum or attend a concert; you wouldn’t have to explain why art is important or cajole them into supporting arts programs. I’d probably hate to know them, and yet I’m sorry I’m not more like them.



*NOTE: The fictional village of Tilling, where Mapp and Lucia live, is based on the town of Rye. Henry James spent his last years there — and Benson was the subsequent occupant of James’ house. In the Mapp and Lucia novels, Benson describes the house in detail, particularly a window ideally situated for spying on the main street; at various points in the story first Mapp and then Lucia live there. The house was destroyed in World War II, so this is as close as we’ll get to it — and thanks to Benson, we have a pretty terrific image now of Henry James sitting in that very window and snooping on his neighbors as he almost certainly must have done.

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On Art, Light Bulbs, and Orgasm

Susanne Mentzer

The mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer has been writing essays lately for The Huffington Post. It’s not enough that she’s a dazzling artist in her own field (the first singer I saw as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and as the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos), she’s also smart about other people’s art, and she expresses herself in lucid prose that is darned near impossible to argue with.

Her latest essay describes some “light-bulb” moments she had while visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid. The magnificent collection there inspired several realizations about the importance of art in general and the need to experience it, to share it, and to support it.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Susanne Mentzer wrote, including the praise for the Prado, which I revisited a few years ago (after touring it as a teenager) and found beautifully proportioned, thoughtfully curated, and thoroughly inspiring. Full of “light bulbs,” in other words.

One thing that struck me while reading is that her light bulbs went off while she was experiencing the art. Visiting a museum, attending a concert or play, these experiences are triggers that lead us to think more, beyond the present moment.

The Prado Museum, Madrid

If some people are dismissive of the importance of art, and hostile to it, it must be at least in part because they haven’t been exposed to art: they haven’t been allowed or haven’t allowed themselves the light-bulb experience. They don’t know what they’re missing. But in consequence, these same people are effectively working to deny the rest of us — anybody else, really — a light-bulb experience.

Those of us who believe in the importance of art are often frustrated by those who don’t. We keep looking for persuasive arguments, but we don’t find them, and they keep on, stubbornly cutting funding and lobbying against what is (if only they knew!) the essence of civilization.

When faced with someone like Sue Sylvester (in her anti-arts campaign for Congress, earlier this season on Glee), we tend to reasonable arguments: “Art is good for the economy! It enhances education! It’s even good for your health!”

These are not, of course, the reasons we like art, and very few of the anti-arts crusaders are reasonable people to begin with: our debates are doomed to failure. We can argue until we’re blue in the face. The trouble is, we’re basically recommending orgasms to people who never had sex.

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, at the Prado.

“You’ll like it,” we say. “It will bring you closer to other people. It requires a little effort sometimes, and you may feel a little self-conscious, but it’s totally worth it. Once you’ve had the experience, you’ll just want to keep doing it. Really, you’ll want it as often as you can get it.” And so on.

Our opponents need light-bulb moments (or orgasms) of their own, but they’re unlikely to get any so long as they never set foot in a museum, a concert hall, or a theater. And meanwhile, they’re making it more difficult for anyone else to have a light-bulb moment.

The first time I heard an opera, I was on a school field trip. This required extra funding for elementary education, as well as funding and donations for the opera company itself. Take a look around and see how well those issues are faring in today’s political and economic climate.

That doesn’t mean that we should stop advocating, and so I’m taking the opportunity today to say, “Brava,” to Susanne Mentzer, essayist.

In her essay, she says she’s not an art-museum person, and yet (for my money) her reactions to the art she saw were exactly right, original to her and yet in keeping with what the artists wanted. Her experience brought her into a community of men and women alive today, and long since passed away. (She was also able to express those reactions beautifully, and to share them with more people still.)

What happened to Susanne Mentzer in the Prado and afterward pretty much sums up why we need to support the arts. I’m grateful to her for sharing her feelings and ideas, and for making me think about my own.

The San Ildefonso Group, sometimes referred to as Orestes and Pylades, a gem of the Prado collections. Seeing it a few years ago, I was overwhelmed. But try explaining that to anybody else.

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