My Favourite Painting

I like a photo at my home. It is on the wall in the kitchen. In the photo, there is a beach. The sky is blue. There is a small boat on the water. My mother gave me the photo. I look at it every day.

There is a photograph in my parents' kitchen. It is a picture of my grandfather at the beach when he was a young man. He is wearing white trousers and a dark shirt. He is smiling. The sea is behind him. I never met my grandfather — he died before I was born. But I look at the photo every time I visit my parents. I do not know who took the picture. I do not know what he was saying that day. But the photo is small and quiet, and I feel something good when I see it.

There is a small black-and-white photograph in my parents' kitchen that I have been looking at for most of my life. It is a picture of my grandmother as a young woman, standing on a beach somewhere on the south coast, in clothes that were clearly fashionable in 1958 and now look like a costume from a period film. She is laughing at something somebody behind the camera has just said. We do not know what was said. The person who took the picture — probably my grandfather, although nobody is sure — has been gone for nearly forty years. My grandmother died when I was nine. The first time I really looked at the photograph, I was probably about twelve, and I remember thinking, with the slightly self-important seriousness of twelve-year-olds, that my grandmother had once been young. This is the kind of obvious thing you only notice once. The next time the photograph really registered with me was when I was twenty-five, had just moved cities, and had been visiting my parents for a weekend. I noticed, that visit, that my grandmother in the picture looked very tired around the eyes, in a way that I had not seen before, and I realised that I was now older than she had been on the day the picture was taken. I have looked at the photograph many times since. It has, on most visits, felt like a small reliable thing in the kitchen. On one or two visits, after a difficult few months, it has felt like a kind of company. I am no longer sure whether I am describing the photograph or describing myself. The photograph is the same photograph. The differences are mine. But the photograph keeps making room for them, and that, I think, is what I love about it.

I have been listening to the same recording of the same Bach cello suite for about fifteen years, and I would like to try to write about it without making any of the moves the appreciation essay usually makes. The performer is a Russian cellist whose name is widely admired in classical music circles, the recording was made in the early 1990s, and I came to it through a friend at twenty-six who put it on while we were cooking dinner one evening and said, casually, 'Listen to this.' I have, since then, listened to the recording roughly once every few months. There is a particular passage in the second movement, about three minutes in, where the cello does something I cannot exactly describe — a small turn, a held note, a pulling-back — and I have, on every listen across fifteen years, paid more attention to that passage than to anything else in the recording. I would like to be honest about what I can and cannot claim about it. I can claim that the passage is real. The cellist plays it the same way every time, which is to say I play the same recording every time. The thing I cannot claim is that what I hear in the passage has stayed the same. At twenty-six I heard something like longing. At thirty I heard something more like grief. At thirty-five — I am being honest — I heard something about my mother that I had not yet been ready to hear when I was thirty. The cellist is not playing my mother. The cello is not, in any literal sense, about her. What is happening, I think, is that the passage has a shape — a shape of pause and return, of pulling back and then continuing — that has been able to hold whatever I have brought to it on a given evening. I should also say that I am not having an original encounter with this recording. The cellist is famous, the recording is famous, the cello suite was loved before I was born and will be loved after I am gone. My relationship with the music is laid on top of the entire institutional history of classical music — concert halls, conservatories, conductors, generations of teachers. The intimacy I feel is real. The intimacy is also small, slightly common, and shared with many people I will never meet. I do not, in the end, know whether the recording has taught me anything I would not otherwise have learned. I think it has slowed me down on a small number of evenings over fifteen years. I think the slowing has, on those evenings, allowed me to notice things that the rest of my life had been keeping me too busy to notice. That is, in the smallest available terms, what I have to offer the genre.

I would like to write about a recording of the Bach cello suites that I have been listening to for fifteen years, and I would like to write about it without making any of the moves the appreciation essay usually makes. The performer is a Russian cellist whose name is widely admired in classical music circles, the recording was made in the early 1990s, and I came to it through a friend at twenty-six who put it on while we were cooking dinner one evening and said, casually, 'Listen to this.' I have, since then, listened to the recording roughly once every few months. There is a particular passage in the second movement of the second suite, about three minutes in, where the cello does something I cannot exactly describe — a small turn, a held note, a pulling-back — and I have, on every listen across fifteen years, paid more attention to that passage than to anything else in the recording. I would like to be honest about what I can and cannot claim about it. I can claim that the passage is real. The cellist plays it the same way every time, which is to say I play the same recording every time. The thing I cannot claim is that what I hear in the passage has stayed the same. At twenty-six I heard something like longing. At thirty I heard something more like grief. At thirty-five — I am being honest — I heard something about my mother that I had not yet been ready to hear at thirty. The cellist is not playing my mother. The cello is not, in any literal sense, about her. What is happening, I think, is that the passage has a shape — a shape of pause and return, of pulling back and then continuing — that has been able to hold whatever I have brought to it on a given evening. I should also flag, because the genre tends to skip it, that I am not having an original encounter with this recording. The cellist is famous, the recording is famous, the cello suites were loved before I was born and will be loved after I am gone. My relationship with the music is laid on top of the entire institutional history of classical music — concert halls, conservatories, conductors, generations of teachers, the Western canon's slow agreement that this composer belongs in any reasonable list of the most important. The intimacy I feel is real. The intimacy is also small, slightly common, and shared with many people I will never meet. I would like to mark that rather than pretend to a private relationship I do not have. What I will say, finally, is that I am not certain 'love' is the right word for what I have with this recording. The verb I would now choose, if pressed, is something more like reliance — the small reliable kind, the kind in which one trusts a particular thing to be itself when one returns to it. The recording has been itself. I have, on perhaps fifty evenings across fifteen years, returned to it. The recording does not remember me. I remember it. That is the most accurate description I can offer.

I have been listening to the same recording of the Bach cello suites for fifteen years, and I would like to write about the recording without making any of the moves the appreciation essay usually makes. There is a cultured-insider version (Bach, the cellist's training, the recording's place in the discography), a moved-layperson version (I do not really know about classical music but this recording moves me), a contrarian version (an attack on the recording's reputation), and a meta version, which I have just entered by listing the others. I cannot pretend not to be in the meta version. I can only try to be honest about what I am doing in it. The performer is a Russian cellist whose name is widely admired. The recording was made in the early 1990s. I came to it through a friend at twenty-six who put it on while we were cooking dinner one evening and said, casually, 'Listen to this.' There is a particular passage in the second movement of the second suite, about three minutes in, where the cello does something I cannot exactly describe — a small turn, a held note, a pulling-back. I have, on every listen across fifteen years, paid more attention to that passage than to anything else in the recording. At twenty-six I heard something like longing. At thirty I heard something more like grief. At thirty-five — I am being honest — I heard something about my mother that I had not yet been ready to hear at thirty. The cellist is not playing my mother. The cello is not, in any literal sense, about her. What is happening, I think, is that the passage has a shape — of pause and return, of pulling back and then continuing — that has been able to hold whatever I have brought to it on a given evening. I should pause here, because the argument I have just made — that the passage has a structure, not a blank surface — is the kind of argument writers like me make to allow ourselves to keep doing what we have been doing. It is sophisticated-sounding, but it is also convenient. The distinction is real and the distinction is convenient. Both can be true. I would rather mark this than tidy it away. I should also flag, because the genre tends to skip it, that I am not having an original encounter with this recording. The cellist is famous, the recording is famous, the cello suites were loved before I was born and will be loved after I am gone. My relationship with the music is laid on top of the entire institutional history of classical music — concert halls, conservatories, generations of teachers, the slow agreement of the Western canon that this composer belongs in any reasonable list. I am one more listener in a slow river of listeners. The intimacy I feel is real. The intimacy is also small, slightly common, and shared with many people I will never meet. What I will not say, by way of closing, is that the recording has become my teacher and that I now hear the world in cello suites. I have, in the last year, noticed that I listen to the recording slightly less often than I used to, and that I have begun to hear the same kind of pause-and-return shape in other places — in some sentences, in some silences in conversations with my mother on the phone, in the small bracket between when one is asked a difficult question and when one answers it. The recording has, in this sense, begun to be less central. The standard arc would have me thanking it for becoming part of me. I find, in the strict sense, that the recording has been less my teacher than my first reliable site for a kind of attention I did not previously know I could pay. The recording does not know me. The cellist, who is alive, also does not know me. Bach has been dead for nearly three centuries. The relationship is one-sided in every direction. I am, in a recording I happen to play once every few months on evenings when I have time to play it, in the very small company of myself listening, which has, on enough evenings, been enough. I am stopping here.