Bel Canto

"Mr. Hosokawa nodded slowly….He had stopped thinking of what he wanted most so many years ago, even when he was a child perhaps. He disciplined himself to only want the things that were possible to have: an enormous industry, a productive family, an understanding of music. And now, a few months after his fifty-third birthday, in a country he had never really seen, he felt desire in the deepest part of himself, the kind of wanting that can only come when the thing you want is very close to you. When he was a child he dreamed of love, not only to witness it, the way he saw love in the opera, but to feel it himself. But that, he decided was madness. That was wanting too much.

I broke my personal policy of never reading a book twice in order to revisit Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. I had read it nearly 20 years ago when it was first published, but decided that was a far too distant past to participate with any conviction in my book group discussion. I had vaguely remembered the story line: a Japanese businessman, an opera diva, a disrupted dinner party and an unlikely hostage situation. After finishing it I told my daughter I would likely post about the human dynamics of people brought together in life-threatening situations, the way it can change us, make us care about one another in new ways or at new levels. She scoffed. ‘That’s sure not what’s happening now, during COVID,’ she claimed, echoing yet again Dr. Fauci’s comment ‘I just don’t know how to tell you that you should care about one another.’

OK, back to the drawing board. Maybe that was a bit too cliched. So I went back to the story and took another look at Opera. Then I watched the delightful movie “The Quartet” and saw a lovely comparison between hip hop of today and opera throughout history. And I realized, both forms of expression are really about human longing. Our very human nature to long for things, to yearn for something. And in all of the characters in Bel Canto, whether the opera diva or the Japanese businessman or the humble translator or the militant soldiers, we see a deep, poignant and profound longing. And the music, not the close proximity nor even the risk, but the music somehow drew people into that space within themselves. One could certainly argue that months in a hostage situation without work, family, or other sources of stability might well point people to their longings. Well, yes, they could. But it was, in fact, the music where the protagonist had found beauty and his longing for it. It was the music which drew one of the soldiers out of his shell to discover a latent voice and a new longing. It was the music that reverberated through the days of each hostage and captor, reminding them of something within them waiting to stir.

Longing is a reaching out of the soul for something life-giving. It is far too often squelched in us, from the childhood reminder that “you git what you git and you don’t throw a fit” to the way the very needs and demands of survival form a film over our longing, which eventually grows opaque and then forms a shell. And then something hardens that shell of self-denial in the form of “OK” ness. ‘I’m fine, really,’ we say to ourselves until we aren’t any more. Then, if we touched with some type of awakening or awareness, the shell cracks and the longing seeps out. Longing for beauty, for comfort, for peace. Longing to dance or to build or to design or paint. The longing of the soul which has been waiting behind a wall of self-sufficiency, waiting for some light to shine through to activate need.

In Patchett’s book it was the alchemy of terror and music which somehow spoke into the collective longing in the room. For many of us, COVID might have cracked the surface to bring out longings we had otherwise ignored. I know it has for me. Even my introverted, “I’ve got this,” personality has cracked under the weight of isolation and I find myself longing for one of those warm summer evening dinners with friends where the wine is flowing and the plates of food are passed while the sun shimmers on the lake beyond the deck. Longing for deep face-to-face conversations. Longing for eye contact. Longing for hugs and touches and even the bump/’excuse me’ of random human contact.

And recognition of tiny longings, can open that crack just a bit more, to shine light on the deeper and perhaps the deepest longings. I am learning more about what mine are, as they evolve and change over time. Perhaps the alchemy of this time is helping you see more deeply into yours.