Hilton Head Island: off

 6 PM.  The sun has set.  The sky and Skull Creek have lingering shades of peach and gold.

I look out on beauty.  I hear beauty.  I am listening to Max Richter’s audacious and successful recomposition of Vivaldi’s FOUR SEASONS.  Yet I am having an off day.  For no reason, which is perhaps all the more troubling.  I have access to more money than I need.  I am with Carol.  I am in extraordinary good health for an old man.

Perhaps the FOUR SEASONS is the clue.  I wanted to create something that lasted as did Vivaldi.

I look up from my iPad on which I am typing.  The colors have deepened.  The contrast between dying light and silhouetted live oak trees greater and even more beautiful.

The body of an athlete, the soul of a poet, the mind of a scientist.  That might even be true.

Of the mind of a scientist I have always liked to quantify and as a teenager I quantified what I wanted from life.  I wanted the love of one woman and I wanted to write something that would last a thousand years, having concluded that if a work of art lasts a thousand years, it will last forever.  ‘Forever’ being defined in human terms.

So I have been loved by many women, or like to believe I have, but my words and voyages will not long outlive me.

Is this the cause of my malaise?  That I will not be immortal?  I do not know and I do not expect sympathy.  There are greater problems in the world.

Perhaps I am just having an off day.