The Opacity Of It All

I spent some time at the exhibition of Ronald Lauder's Cubist collection at the Met, and followed that up with buying the immense, heavy catalogue which I dutifully lugged in my suitcase back down to Sarasota so that I could study what I had seen.  Turns out that I find the essays hard to understand, and that, coupled with my lifelong resistance to Cubism, is making for a dead experience.  I love a Braque painting of rocks and trees in the Lauder exhibition, an intimation really of the Cubism that was to be, and I love certain Cezanne paintings of villages whose geometric edges play with the artist's tendency to dab paint on in little jabs which make rhythms of squares which taken together hint again at the Cubism to come.  But those guitars, or human features, completely redone, so that it becomes a puzzle to work them out, spare me.  The catalogue does not help me.  Am I just growing more and more resistant to making meaning or am I becoming less and less able to understand words?  Atul Gawande's latest book I devoured and now use it as a yardstick to measure my own slow decline.  I think I just understand things less well (although I understood Gawande's book well enough).  I bought T.J Clark's Picasso and Truth a while back and find it impenetrable.  But then last night at the restaurant where we went to eat, the young, very young it seems to me, maitre d', clearly an American, very beautiful indeed, well painted and well tressed, spoke to us in a slurred manner that I catch from time to time when passing teenagers in the mall, or hearing slice of television somewhere or another.  It is, I guess, a new manner of speaking, and I could not understand a word she said.  Not a word.  Well, these are all disconcerting thoughts combined this morning with reading a number of very unfavorable reviews for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which I have spent about two hundred and fifty dollars for two tickets for our coming week in New York.  And Stoppard is always so hard to understand.  That and a lousy production and the two hundred fifty dollars.  Thank God, I can think of my sessions with my trainer and my improved balance and find a modicum of joy and happiness.