Our third floor bedroom balcony door is wide open. The air outside is foggy and seemingly motionless. Occasionally a vehicle squishes by. The dullness inspires tranquillity and indolence. And the operatic aria of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro sung by Kiri te Kanawa.

The Marriage of Figaro is a commedia per musica (opera buffa) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera’s libretto is based on the 1784 stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (“The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro”). It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.

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As I lackadaisically drove eastwardly late this afternoon, windows and landau roof open, with the blazing sun at my back along the rise and fall of the clear highway, there was an advancing mountain of dark grey cloud in the distance. Within minutes a deluge of rain fell. The cloudburst was so torrential that cars stopped alongside the road, emergency flashers on. Then the rain passed. It stopped as precipitously as it had begun. The ambient temperature fell from 32°C to 23°C.

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“As the authority of the Church, the monarchy and the government began to wane in the late eighteenth century, a new public sphere emerged. For the first time in Europe, people from many different walks of life were able to socialize together in the city, and it became far less scandalous for people from different social classes to mix.”

“In England, the emergence of the coffee house was pivotal to this new public sphere. The first coffee houses emerged in England and the trend soon spread into Paris and across Europe until, in the late eighteenth century, establishments where people met to drink coffee became commonplace. Far more refined and sociable than the taverns that preceded them, coffee shops became places to meet for intelligent conversation and enlightening debate. Suddenly people became coffee and chocolate connoisseurs and spent hours in their favorite cafés reading and discussing whatever it is they might have read.”

Excerpt From
Age of Enlightenment: A History From Beginning to End
Hourly History

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Seldom nowadays am I out of bed before 7 o’clock in the morning.  Though it resounds of discreditable inertia and is clearly offensive to the Protestant Work Ethic, it is but the evident sequel to retirement and old age. Normally there is not a great deal that is otherwise compelling. But today we prepared for the arrival of new bedroom furniture.  I arose sharply at 6:30 am. Shamefully my motive was to remove myself as quickly as possible from the anticipated commotion.  My current condition is such that I readily acknowledge my inutility in these matters of critical strength.  Accordingly I attacked the usual ceremony of ablutions and by 7:22 am I was on my bicycle and moving. Out of the way! Besides a short ride about the neighbourhood was the precise tonic on an ideal Saturday summer morning.

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On the drive home late this morning from the office of the audiologist on Centrepointe Drive in Nepean we proposed to make a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. Each of us had been up early in preparation for the appointment. It was hours since we had eaten. In addition we had prolonged today’s medical outing by afterwards dropping into the nearby home of an ancient friend whom we had not seen for considerable time. He greeted our unannounced visit with gusto. And we got to meet his new little dog which happily for her and us reinvigorated our love of dogs.

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As a human being – and absent pure arrogance on my part – I resist describing myself with the same generality and overall assessment of any other animal. Obviously it is not the appearance of the animal which offends me. Rather it is the predictability and uniformity of the animal’s nature. When viewing either a flock of geese or a pride of lions for example it is disconcerting to imagine that a human being is from a moderate distance not unlike any other collection of the same species – basically unrecognizable. The problem is not so much that I am like them; instead it’s that I’m like you. My singularity is effectively diluted to the point of anonymity, even obscurity, invisibility or inconsequence.

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By stroke of luck we were able on short notice to convene at the golf club for breakfast this morning with my erstwhile physician and globetrotting brother of the Craft. He was captured like an errant bee between jaunts as broadly disentangled as British Columbia and Italy. These passages are but an introduction to his early winter seclusion late autumn in Florida. Thereafter I have no idea. I find I must constantly reacquaint myself with his complex peripatetic agenda.

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The regularly cited aside that history repeats itself is exemplified in different ways many of which are often highly uncomplimentary.  Yet even when the record is seemingly improving and forward looking there is an underlying current of repetition which by that character alone contaminates the overall regard. In a word, as significant as was the original dereliction and the resulting fulfillment, nothing has changed. The clock is just rewound and everything starts over again. The abstraction is an especially shocking admission from the astronomic perspective of time; that is, when looking back some 300 years. Granted, humanity and its animal nature are never completely disassociated. Yet the adhesion points to a far stronger alliance, one that historically is recalcitrant and implacable. We seemingly haven’t learned to distinguish ourselves from a fighting mob intent upon domination and control. It represents a curious entanglement with leadership of the pride as though uniformity and potency were the answers.

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The buoyancy of life, though undeniably mercurial, is by compensating contrast reciprocal. There are good days and bad days, ups and downs. And while there is never any guarantee, there are nonetheless those singularly pleasant days that inexplicably colour the canvas of life’s easel. Today is just one of those days, a good day, a healthy harvest of ample proportion; and, a warm sunny day to boot. The fortuity of the day is naturally its unanticipated delight, an unfolding of epic proportions. It is an alternately persuasive rendition to what only as recently as yesterday was considered an entirely uneventful and speculative focus.  There is taunting heat under a blazing sun followed by a relieving light breeze devoid of humidity. There is as well the enduring image of dedicated gardeners bent over their flower beds like common labourers, plucking spoiled blossoms to preserve the idyllic perfection of the midsummer day.

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Fresh corn from the stalk imposes a risk for those who prefer to eat from the argent end of a fork or spoon. Its added perils are dripping butter on one’s waistcoat and smarting salt on one’s lips. While I cannot recall when I first ate corn-on-the-cob, I most certainly recollect the image of my late father (who was normally reserved and restrained) at the head of table industriously devoted solely to the management of his soup plate of fresh vegetables slathered in butter and a spot of milk, his buttered corn at the ready so to speak à côté.

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