Going

Eighteen

“As long as we’re getting into that end of the evening, Henry, I’ll allow myself the privilege of delivering a little analysis, too. Do you know what the real trouble with you is? With your music, with your soul, with everything? You don’t suffer. You’ve never been touched by pain, or, if you have, it doesn’t sink in. Look, you’re forty years old, and you’ve never known anything but success, and your music is played everywhere, an incredible achievement for a living composer, and you could pass for thirty. Or even twenty-seven. Time doesn’t claw you. I don’t recommend suffering, mind you, but I do say it tempers an artist’s soul; it adds a richness of texture that—forgive me—you lack, Henry. You know, you could live to be a very old man, considering the way you don’t seem to age, and someday, when you’re ninety-seven or one hundred five or something like that, you may realize that you’ve never really intersected reality, that you’ve kept yourself insulated, and that in a sense you haven’t really lived at all or created anything at all or—forgive me, Henry. I take it all back, even if you are still smiling. Not even a friend should say things like that. Not even a friend.”