"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Perhaps you will gradually, without ever noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Years ago, when I was but a girl-woman in college, I hitchhiked from New Hampshire down to Boston to hear Miles Davis play. It was midsummer, and I slipped into the bar area of the packed club with my friends in a state of rapture that I would get to hear him in person.
Half way through the set, something odd happened. Miles' eyes seemed to pick me out of the crowd, and it wasn't a good look. He stopped playing. This wasn't one of his famed moments of silence that could be so amazing. It was as if he was terribly angry with me. As if I was the Ghost of Christmas Past risen up in July. He walked off the stage, and he never came back.
Two years ago, one of my friends brought Jimmy Cobb to a New Year's Day party that my honey, David, and I threw. Cobb was the drummer on Miles' famous "Kind of Blue" album, one of my favorites. And as he and I got to know each other a little I related the experience, now so long ago. He told me that I look like one of Miles' ex-girl friends. I don't think the affair ended well.
Maybe Cobb was just making a fanciful remark, but for me it was like hearing the proverbial second shoe fall, decades after the first.
And that experience, and Rilke's wonderful quote, has made me think a good deal about patience lately, and my longing to have more at a time when it's so easy to find instant gratification in so many ways.
I've been impatient lately with two films I recently saw -- Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy and Melancholia.
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