“For a young composer to feel the weight of that body, the finality, we know it affected him,” said celebrated cellist Lynn Harrell. He was describing the welter of feelings bearing down on 29-year-old Franz Schubert, one of six pallbearers carrying Beethoven’s coffin at his funeral in Vienna on March 29, 1827.
Of course, Harrell could [...]
One day Daniel Callahan accompanied his friend Paul Desjardins to the dry cleaners. As they were leaving the shop, Desjardins, a World War II veteran working on a doctorate degree in philosophy, turned to Callahan, an 18-year-old student at Yale, and asked, “How do you think I did?” The befuddled Callahan stammered, “What do you [...]
Jack Coleman lugged the foul-smelling garbage bin from the curb and tipped it over into the rear of the sanitation truck. Returning it to the curb, he noticed an elderly woman staring at him. Actually, she was scowling. Unable to contain herself further, she blurted out, “Do you think you’ll ever amount to anything?”
Saying such [...]
Robert Ballard has always been a hunter, an explorer, a finder of lost things. Growing up in San Diego, he was enchanted by stories of explorers and their adventures.
One was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. As a 10-year-old Ballard dreamed of being on board Captain Nemo’s submarine, Nautilus, and peering through its giant window at [...]
For Americans coming of age in the middle of the 20th century, one Hollywood actor above all others embodied the virtues and bravado of the American West — John Wayne.
But the movie star, whose real name was Marion Morrison, was mythology. In John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity Garry Wills described him as our “American Adam [...]