Proofs

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I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing George and Ira Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me"--you know, from the Gershwin Songbook, with Nelson Riddle--and I thought, you know, philosophers have spent a lot of time arguing whether or not there is a God, first cause, prime mover, and all that, but all they really have to do is listen to Ella sing "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and you know there has to be a divine being out there somewhere.

Which made me wonder what else there is to offer the same sort of argument.

I came up with

• Riddle's instrumental bridge on Frank Sinatra's "The Tender Trap"
• Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle again--this time on their August 1960 recording of Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me."
• Frank Sinatra, with Count Basie this time, "Fly Me To the Moon" on Live at the Sands
• Fred Astaire's exhuberant "Shine on Your Shoes" dance from The Bandwagon
• The final moment in John Huston's The Dead, in which the camera tilts up into the face of the swirling snow and Donal McCann, in his deeply resonant voice-over, finishes reciting the last line of Gabriel Conroy's monologue, ". . .the snow. . .faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
• This passage from James Joyce's short story on which Huston based his film:
• His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down; the fellow of it lay upon its side.

and what that image means at that moment in Gabriel Conroy's life.

• Frank Patterson singing "The Lass of Aughrim" in Huston's film.
• James Joyce's "Araby," the entire story, but just read this one sentence as an example: "Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds."
• The third movement of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony #3
• The final paragraph of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"
• That final moment in Woody Allen's Manhattan: He's just begged Mariel Hemingway not to go to London and she's said she's going anyway, and he counters that she'll not return the same person, and she says, "Look, you have to have a little faith in people," and Allen cocks his head for a moment, considering it, and the slightest smile appears as Rhapsody in Blue swells, the New York skyline, and The End.
• Thom Jones short story "The Pugilist at Rest"
• Driving with three of my children one morning in summer, they on their way to swim, me on my way to work out, hit the Nordic Trak and the weights, all the while I'm thinking, do I have time for this, how's my day going to go, am I going to get everything finished, and then rounding a curve and finding a young doe, lost and confused, standing in the middle of the road a half mile from my house, wandering to within three feet of my car, and stopping for a moment, she looking at us, we looking at her before she bounds off, into the woods alongside the road.
• The final movement of Shostakovich's Symphony #11
• The Cardinals' Ozzie Smith in his prime
• The late, great Jack Buck calling a baseball game on the radio
• Any baseball game anywhere: St. Louis, Des Moines, Keokuk, that miniature Fenway Park outside Cincinnati, Ohio, along Interstate 74, or fifth graders playing on a mostly dirt field behind a grade school
• The scent of the pages of a brand new Penguin paperback
• Glenn Gould's performance of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations
• The opening of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:
• "This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come to lunch. I know what this means."
• Don Ellis' "Variations for Trumpet"--a recording which is, shamefully, not available on a U.S. issue compact disc.
• On a Sunday in February, I take my 10-year-old son with me to a Waffle House near us. As the place usually is on a Sunday morning, it's packed, and there are only two seats left, at the counter, above the sink where the waitresses wash the dishes and silver, and my son and I take them and order our waffles and sausage. Next to my son is a woman in her seventies who has one of those hand-held electronic solitaire games that she plays the entire time she eats her breakfast, alternately taking a bit of her waffle and then stabbing a finger at a button on her game to make a play. At one point while we're waiting for our food, a customer plays the juke box, a Whitney Houston song, "And I Will Always Love You," and almost immediately the sixty-something year old waitress, a short, efficient red-headed woman named Rose, starts to sing along with the song as she rinses silver, not quietly, under her breath, but full tilt, belting it out, not at all self-conscious. At about that point, my son leans his head against my shoulder and starts giving my back little pats of affection--and I recall suddenly a phrase I read in a book by Jean-Pierre de Cassaude, Abandonment To Divine Providence: "the sacrament of the present moment," and I think, yes, this is one of those moments. And I think, you know, when you're in high school and you're talking about ambition, you don't say to your friends, "Yeah, well, you want to be a rock star or a major league ball player, but here's what I want: on a Sunday in winter near the end of the century, I want to be in a cramped little restaurant, waiting for breakfast, and have my ten-year-old son impulsively lay his head on my shoulder and pat my back." But you know what? A moment like that, just that scant couple of seconds in the billions of years of Creation is full of as much evidence of divine love as anyone could ask for--as monumental a moment as any that ever was or any that ever will be.
• Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry"--the live version, such a brilliant and moving piece of music that, at 6:55, it's far too short. Play it loud, with the windows flung open on a spring day. "Everything's going to be all right, yeah, everything's going to be all right."
• Stevie Wonder's marvelous song "As" from Songs in the Key of Life
• Duke Ellington, especially for "Take the A-Train," "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing," and "East St. Louis Toodle-o" (oh, Cootie Williams!)
• The Electric Light Orchestra's amazing "Mr. Blue Sky." If you've heard the song, I don't need to say any more.
• My kids.
• My kids.
• My kids.

Here's what others have contributed to the project

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