Protecting permanence: What do we have left to conserve, right now, today? The second letter of The Harper Review’s spring issue written by Gabe Bayer begins with this very question. The desire to conserve implies the existence of a preservable entity: a devotion to “the permanent things,” the immutable, the enduring. Bayer deftly moves through candidates for renewal—social institutions, financial markets—and finds just what conditions we really can sustain.
Charlie Phelan, assistant editor
Dwarfed dreams: In Walter Benjamin’s essay “Metaphysics of Youth,” he writes, “youth is not a time period; it is a substance.” Children, for Benjamin, are flâneurs, allegorists, dreamlike observers. They are natural dawdlers and collectors for whom every object is alive, endowed with eyes and ears and magical animistic force, like in the world of fairy tales. Little kids’ relationship to the world is entirely mimetic, and so they are initiated into the secret lives of all sorts of objects. They are oriented to “the future of an unknown past and the past of an unknown future,” and observe carefully, with a “disposition to uncover.”
In the basement of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the exhibit of the Thorne Miniature Rooms, everyone becomes a Benjaminian child again.
The museum’s permanent collection houses 68 of Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s tiny, obsessively detailed European and American interiors dated from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. The little worlds are fixed moments, in dioramas behind glass, on a 1:12 scale. In the late-eighteenth-century Cape Cod living room, for example, a grandma has left her glasses on the table and a child has just left a full toy set on a chair; the door is cracked open just enough that it feels like the whole family has a mere moment ago run out into the full rose garden outside. Each room is made out of period-appropriate materials, like silver bowls and crystal chandeliers. Thorne even commissioned original works of miniature art and furniture from well-known painters like Fernand Léger and sculptors like John Storrs. Part of their magic is that the rooms each suggest a continuous world outside the composition, through lights at the top of a stairway or a full city skyline lit up in the distance. People in these exhibits tilt their bodies and crane their necks to point at a detail on a newspaper or a modernist ashtray, projecting themselves into the world of Jane Austen or the Shakers or Marie Antoinette, and whispering to their families about alternate lives behind the glass.
In his essay on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Benjamin says that the return to childhood has “unlimited healing powers.” So go to the Art Institute, peek into the miniature worlds, and think like a little kid again. When you leave the museum, all healed and nostalgic, Millennium Park will be a new, futuristic (and very large) playhouse.
Zoë Feigelson, assistant editor
The first one now will later be last: Bob Dylan, voice of America, is 84. Not that this matters much anyway. A Google search for Bob Dylan’s age provides the following follow-up query of when did Bob Dylan come out, the answer to which being “1962” (duh). Almost six years out from his most recent album, still plodding along on the Never Ending Tour (which has never ended since 1988) and still making headlines by his very existence, he remains a monument of astounding timelessness. I was recently asked by a friend if I thought he was growing closer to death, and I instinctively responded that surely, he would outlive me. By his own admission, he would “sleep with life and death in the same bed” just as long as they get their mouths away from him. Just like Joe Hill, one of Dylan’s antecedent idols, he would remain alive in death just as much as you and me, incapable of dying when his life and spirit are so bound up with the sprawling future of America, when even in dismissing him, it speaks his language.
Last Monday, a friend and I drove up to Waukegan to see Dylan and his band live in the midst of what one commentator has called a “late, late, late, career renaissance.” Sleepy crumbling Waukegan was packed to its gills with out-of-towners driving through the incessant rain to watch an 84-year-old man play for an hour and a half in a regional theater, which specialized in artists of Dylan’s age bracket—Smokey Robinson and the Glenn Miller Orchestra (back from their 1944 aerial plunge into the English Channel) were to arrive the month later. When Dylan did emerge from whatever fugue state he generally lives in, the entire audience rose to applaud. Dylan, as usual, looked at them as if they had come for the band and discretely sat down at his piano, launching into a slightly ironic version of “To Be Alone With You” to an audience at maximum capacity. Drawing seemingly at random from any of his forty studio albums, he played contentedly for himself, howling and raving through “Man in the Long Black Coat” and murmuring, with the dynamics of a lullaby, concert staple of “Black Rider” taken, like much of the concert, taken from his most recent album. Through switchbacks to adolescence with covers of Eddie Cochran and Bo Diddley, accompanied by a somewhat elderly-sounding band, I was left to wonder at points if I was listening to an above-average Bob Dylan cover band, thoughts quickly dispelled by rapid changes in song selection, always into the chilling and prophetic.
The high water mark of the concert was Dylan’s midshow apologia, delivered to 2,400 rapt students and judges. “Crossing the Rubicon,” a recitation of the epic of Dylan’s imaginary life, pronounced by a martial drumbeat over the faint hum of bass and guitars, places its speaker in a “killing frost… between heaven and earth,” contemplating at once Rome and the Red River, “three miles north of purgatory, one step from the great beyond.” Staring blankly at the audience, hoodie drawn over his head and body drawn over his piano, he cast his die into the pool of admirers, summarizing his life and legacy with an epitaph of pure insouciance: I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon.
Driving back late through the rain, crossing the Rubicon with Dylan seemed an obvious, unenviable choice. As my friend remarked, struck by the force of prophecy, watching him was like being in the presence of a monument, a titanic figure, situated within history while still making it himself. Still commanding silence at eighty four, articulating what poet Robert Polito calls a “ghost language” unbothered with space and time, Dylan, the timeless lyrist of the phantasmagoria of American life, speaks from the burning bush into the bush of ghosts, with us now and forever as his happy lookers-on, caught on the tails of his long black coat.
Brady Santoro, managing editor
Image: Elihu Vedder, The Cumaean Sibyl, watercolor on paper, 1896 (Brooklyn Museum, New York).