A Steinway on the Beach, Wounds and Other Blessings
A Steinway on the Beach, Wounds and Other Blessings by Roger Rosenblatt ‘58
A Steinway on the Beach is a series of meditations, whimsical musings, free associations, and questions, both answered and unanswered, on the theme expressed in the subtitle, that misfortunes may be fortunate. At the center is the author’s mind as it meanders, fueled by events (such as the piano, which astoundingly washed up on the beach) and remembrances both of lived events and of all the lore – literary, biblical and historical—that this mind (and heart) has absorbed. Although the form feels free and somewhat random, a closer look confirms that the topic of how the hurtful and the helpful, both always present, are emmeshed in each other.
One insight came from Lewis Thomas, the renowned father of another Friends writer, Abigail Thomas ’59. He called our very existence a “wonderful mistake.” It is a tenet of the theory of evolution, that species owe their existence to errors, or. wounds in the terminology of the book, in our genetic makeup. Without mutations I guess we would still be one-celled asexually reproduced organisms. The errors in DNA could certainly be considered blessings if you happen to like being aware you are alive, appreciate music, and take joy in thought. The quote behind this positive view of injury is Rumi’s “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
Free associations can get dark as beer becomes bier and morphs into a small bier in Sudan, but mainly they are darkly fun and just as complicated and contradictory as humankind tends to be. The beer-bier chain occurs in a riff on what the world is. The world (turns out) “speaks your language. The world speaks no language, certainly not yours….” Okay.
Vignettes introduce us to the author’s encounters with exemplary characters. He meets Betty, a woman who sings on street corners for change, when he volunteers in a project to help the homeless. She claims an unlikely past of glamor. Yet she turns up in an old issue of Life, dancing with Joe DiMaggio.
If I were having a chat with Roger Rosenblatt about this book, I would tell him that throughout the book I kept thinking about Sartre. Some place in my long-ago education I remember Sartre writing that man (which I believe in his mind included people like me) was the hole in being. A hole, a wound, I guess it’s the same thing. The idea is that what consciousness adds is the thought that there could possibly have been nothing at all. Questions like where do we come from and why are we here don’t seem to go on in the heads of other species. Nothingness is nowhere but in the human brain, and we are blessed to be the hole (the wound) in being.
