November-December

 25 th 

“In fact, I sought the man with the stubble more than “in the broad ways”: I sought him in the gardens of Monet, the novels of Genet, the preludes of Ravel, the statues of Easter Island, the biographies of Jack the Ripper, and in a thousand beds and bars of Europe and the East. The not finding is, in a sense, art. Though art isn’t, conversely, not finding. (Picasso: “Je trouve d’abord, je cherche après.”) (Imagine being rich as Croesus and able to trace the past. Imagine being led to “his” hospital room today in, say, Urbana or Wichita, or rather, to his grave. The joke of it!) Those musical sketches for “Song of Songs” I showed to Leo Sowerby, but didn’t tell him what had impelled me toward the text. I never told anyone.”

— Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir by Ned Rorem

3 December 

“I’ve not joined the avant-garde (henceforth called the Academy) it’s not that I don’t approve of—or even agree with—them; it’s because of a terror of losing my identity. Still, I’m capable of arguing any view or its opposite, depending on who I’m trying to persuade what to.”

— The Paris Diary & The New York Diary, 1951–1961 by Ned Rorem