Yet I've just returned from a choral concert on campus during which - for twenty minutes or so - I was assailed by pessimism. Sitting along in the front row, concentrating 100 percent on the music (performed with fair accuracy), I was concentrating also 100 percent on the choristers whom I pictured naked and exuding a gamy young smell as they e-nun-ci-a-ted with clear eyes riveted on the conductor's "sculpturing" gestures. Such children, such believers, so eager. I imagined them dead. Which one would be the first, no longer to hear, to see or feel his companions, turn to rot, leave his grief stricken parents? Who would be the first, and when? This year? The boys were in tuxedoes, the girls in sea-green evening gowns. Those (of each sex) who are to graduate (to graduate!) in June were privileged with red carnations, like Marguerite Gauthier. One soprano stood delicate and intense with an angular beauty and a good crop of hair as satiny as Rosemary's in adolescence; I could not refrain from seeing her in the coffin; her mother's tears as she clipped those locks form the cedar chest. Well, the necromantic bathos of those fancies was also the musical background: some setting of Christina Rosetti's When I am dead, my dearest. But it made me cry. Energy of foreboding urges a composition of feeble phrases which nevertheless outlast the morose self. << less