Performance

It is said that Edgar Degas was only truly happy in attendance of performance. Painting, sketching, etching, these were all pasttimes that grew out of his fondness for the creative and created world. His long hours at the Paris Opera observing the bunheads rushing to classes and rehearsals must have been a close second. His art is self-consciously observational, acutely aware of itself as an act of witness ... or voyeurism.

I have known this great pleasure also, and there is nothing finer in the world I know. Perhaps I have lost myself in some similar bliss at times on the dance floor, and maybe once on stage. But these are very different, since the pleasure of playing a part in performance hinges directly on its quality, as with the dancing, though to a much lesser degree. All of these are engagements with the aesthetic world, a world that beckons with its expression of the range of human emotion, with its layered meanings and intellectual delights, and with its casting off of all that is trite and mundane.

Still, what becomes of the dreamers when the dream is ended? Where do we go, we who've tasted the sweetness of the life of the mind, only to find that a world of pea soup and cold macaroni lurks forever among the footlights? And can this escape be a healthy way of dealing (or not dealing) with the real world? When my mind is troubled, this is one of its familiar haunts.