to the last drop

Travel plans having fallen through, I spent part of my morning making turkey-okra soup and reading old clippings, including an Aileen Kelly essay in the New York Review of Books titled "Chekhov the Subversive."

[Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife] describes his final moments in a scene that sounds like pure Chekhovian theater. The doctor ordered champagne to ease his breathing. Chekhov sat up, announced to the doctor in German, "Ich sterbe."

Then he picked up his glass, turned to me, smiled his wonderful smile, and said: "It's been such a long time since I've had champagne." He drank it all to the last drop, lay quietly on his left side, and was soon silent forever. The ... stillness ... was broken only by a huge nocturnal moth which kept crashing painfully into the light bulbs ... [Then] the cork flew out of the half-empty champagne bottle with a tremendous noise.

Also:

Chekhov's "anonymous hero" tells a world-weary intellectual that it is never too late to reshape one's life: "The thief hanging on the Cross was able to regain the joy of life and boldly confident hope, though perhaps he had no more than an hour to live." Life "is given only once and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty."

["An Anonymous Story"; not sure whose translation/edition was quoting from]



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(no subject)

Recent reading has included Eleanor Self's You'll Never Get There If You Don't Go There, on working up the nerve to go to group yoga classes.

I can relate. While I have a reputation for being intrepid about many things, I have yet to make it to an English country dance class or a shape-note sing in this here town. It City-ness notwithstanding, Nashville remains small enough that I am likely to run into someone I know or someone who knows someone I know no matter what I am dabbling or dipping my toe into. That's daunting when you know you are on the beginner-pocked slope of the learning curve and that falling on your butt (aka borking figures or misreading intervals) is inevitable.

Then again, I've landed on my tail countless times in the studio (hello, awkward pose!) and forgotten about it within minutes. What would it be like to be as okay with all my other not-yet-theres -- to grin at the mirror and move on?


[Posted in response to a Reverb15 prompt at Kat McNally's: "I am wondering what would happen if I allowed a little more out-of-control-ness in my life. So I invite you to consider: where could you (like me) consider turning it up a few notches in the new year?"]

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/123686.html.