'The American Sphinx'

Forgive my absence for a few days.

Low back pain. Doctor. Please don't let it be a kidney stone. Good news. Inflamed sciatic nerve. Really? At (almost) 33? Oh, well. It's not a stone. Thank God.

Watched for the first time since its 1997 premiere the Ken Burns Thomas Jefferson biography. Our third president is an enigma, indeed.

One can't help but admire Jefferson. One also can't help but marvel at his contradictions. The author of the American Scripture, the Declaration of Independence, who never freed his slaves. The man with an organized mind and cluttered, chaotic personal habits.

Joseph J. Ellis calls Jefferson the American Sphinx. That's as apt a description as any.

I am always moved by the story of Jefferson's reconciliation with John Adams during the last decade of their lives. Their letters are elegiac -- moving and monumental.

Perhaps this spring or summer I can return to Virginia, to Monticello, to the house Jefferson never quite finished. I would love to stroll the campus of the university he designed and dream again of living the scholarly life.

I stand in awe of his intellect and am frustrated by his public (that terrible embargo) and private acts. And, yet, I forgive him somewhat, too. Even the great Jefferson was a product of his time.

Of all the great moments in the American experience, surely Jefferson's and Adams' deaths on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of our Declaration, soar among the stars.

If Washington is the father and Lincoln is the savior, Jefferson, then, is the soul -- encompassing both the light and the darkness, the good and the bad, the great American dilemma between ideals and reality.

'Nixon in China': An opera, an experience

So I watched "Nixon in China," the stunning, curious opera by John Adams, seen the way it should be -- in living HD -- on a big screen at Regal Cinema West Town Mall yesterday. (The only thing better, of course, would be experiencing it at the Met itself.)

And this is an opera to be experienced. I still don't know what I think about it. One thing is certain. Adams and that whirling dervish of a director Peter Sellars, who has the most colorful coif since Don King, have produced the most important American opera since "Porgy and Bess."

In the current Met production, James Maddalena sings Nixon in the role that he created in the opera's 1987 debut in Houston. Janis Kelly plays a sympathetic Pat Nixon, Russell Baun is Chou En-lai, Robert Brubaker is Mao Tse-tung, Kathleen Kim is Chiang Ch'ing (Madame Mao) and Richard Paul Fink is Henry Kissinger. Composer Adams also conducts.

The best scene is the rather faithfully adapted meeting between Nixon and Mao. Nixon tries to talk pragmatic politics; Mao mumbles in generalities. The worst scene is the opera-within-an-opera in which Kissinger is reduced to a strutting buffoon. It isn't Fink's fault; he does a superb job with what is scripted. For some reason, Adams decided that Kissinger would provide the comic relief and it doesn't work.

"Nixon in China" made me think of the work of composer Philip Glass. Maybe it's its minimalism. Maybe it's because I downloaded and listened to Glass's "Violin Concerto No. 2" last week. I don't know. I do know that I'm glad I saw it.

The second act is the weakest link, but the third act, also surreal, nearly redeems the mistake, as the main characters muse on mortality, reality and what-might-have-beens.

Read about the current Met production and other related material here.

The New York Times review is here.

Gay Talese gathers former Kissinger aide Winston Lord's reaction to the opera in a "Talk of the Town" piece for the current anniversary edition (2/14 and 2/21/11) of The New Yorker.

The best book on Nixon's 1972 China trip to date is "Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World" by Margaret MacMillan.

Borne back into the past

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

Sometimes it is an escape.

I love history. Hell, I should love it, since I majored in it during college and spend a good portion of my working life writing about it.

But it's more than a vocation. It's very much an avocation. It's a passion.

A few weeks ago, while checking out at a store, I noticed the clerk had been reading David McCullough's biography on John Adams. So, we struck up a conversation. And I realized, while talking about our nation's founders, that part of the appeal lies in the fact that so many of these great characters from history are exactly that -- characters.

No novelist, not even Shakespeare, could dream up the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Horatio Alger has nothing on Harry Truman's ascent to the White House. Even Dickens couldn't come up with as colorful a character as Teddy Roosevelt.

The American Civil War? My goodness, what to say about that? And we haven't even mentioned European or Asian history yet.

For me, though, I think history is also an escape. To what I'm not exactly sure. I think it gives me an illusion that things were better once, more romantic, more noble. I sometimes get depressed because I look at our current era and its great challenges and fail to see the hero on the horizon who's going to help us fix the mess.

And so, like Fitzgerald's boat against the current, I escape back to the past, back to something I've never known, back to a time of great ideas, back to the interesting, flawed men and women who shaped the American experience.

I like what I find there. But, does it make me crazy if I tell you that sometimes I don't want to return to the present?