Bulwark Takes - What You Should Be Reading Right Now (w/ Jay Nordlinger) | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

National Review's Jay Nordlinger joins Bill Kristol on this week’s Bulwark on Sunday to discuss what you should be reading right now to understand the world around us.

Hi, I'm Bill Kristol. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined today by my old friend, former colleague at the Weekly Standard for a few years, and then ever since at National Review. I wouldn't say colleague, Bill. You were the boss. You were the big kahuna, and I was a minnow. You were great. I think of you as a mid-sized fish, at least. Maybe a trout or something. Anyway, has written so well for National Review for so many years on politics, but also a very distinguished music critic, mostly at the New Criterion,

but also at National Review on your impromptus there. Everyone should read you at National Review, read your impromptus, follow you on Blue Sky and X, and that will guide people to your writings. Or just follow me on blue sky at X. And I'll, I looked to you enough that they could find your, your stuff. What do you find about blue sky at X incidentally?

So X is, is the old Twitter you and I run it for several years. Many of you were around before, I think, but the, I, do you find, do you get more responses,

much response these days from blue skies from X? I think you do what I do and post on both, right? Most of the time. It's an odd thing i have many many more followers on x than on blue sky and i have more so-called engagement on blue sky i'm gonna have a relative handful of followers on blue sky but they seem to want to talk which is very nice yeah i think blue sky has been successful and i think we should all make it more so i have a zillion almost a million followers next but somebody that were not active is my sense or

or i never really look at the responses but i do see the numbers of just people who read the stuff or i guess click on it you know respond to it i don't read the responses but that would drive me crazy but a lot of them maybe don't agree with me or with you anymore you know what this is going to be a non-political discussion. We're not going to mention the name of the current occupant of the Oval Office and talk about literature and maybe get to a little music and poetry too. And I really want to – you're the person who inspired this, both because you've written so well over the years on literature as well as music, but also when did we have dinner after the election?

That was maybe a month after, I'm going to say, December, maybe early January. Less than that. I can't remember. Maybe three, four weeks. And I said, what's up? And you said you haven't been following politics as much because you vowed.

Well, you tell the story. Well, I hadn't been writing about politics. I'm off the wagon now. Yes. Very important for you can't write and read at the same time. And so I've consumed so much media and I've read in books for the purpose of writing, which is different from reading books properly. And I decided, goll darn it, pretend you're literate, Jay, read a few books and maybe write about a few of them. So I went on a jag. But this was partly in response to avoiding

politics for a few weeks after the election. I think it was for a distraction for, you know, Bill Buckley would say, all politics and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And he was never a dull boy. And I learned pretty quickly, but just about the last thing he wanted to talk about socially was politics. Yeah, interesting. So, you know, I have a long list of books I'll never get to, and I knocked a few off. So the one I remember you telling me about, which I, who I've not read and barely knew of, really, was Stefan Zweig. So for me, that's been a revelation. You're talking, telling me about him, and I don't think he's that well-known these days as he once was.

So say a word, say a word about him. I feel like he's become a friend of mine. He's someone I admire a great deal, who teaches you, who consoles you. He was a great man of letters, wrote all types of things. All my life I had heard from David Price Jones and others, you must read Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. And I had never read any Zweig at all. And Zweig is what, early 20th century? Yes. He's born in, I think, 1881, and he dies by his own hand in 1942 in Brazil. So he's at the lives, the first part of his life is at the zenith of cosmopolitan Vienna, you know, a golden age, the beautiful, great liberal polyglot cosmopolitan city. And

Zweig had all of European civilization within him, and he knew everybody. World War I comes, great shock, the world is destroyed. 20 years later, we know about that. So I think I first read a novel of his published posthumously, The Post Office Girl. I couldn't put it down. And then I read a better known novel of his, Beware of Pity. Couldn't put it down. And I was a little daunted by his memoirs titled The World of Yesterday. It's big and fat. Are those novels reasonably slim so that one can actually those books who are daunted by big fat books could pick them up? Yes. Yes. And they're very, these books are full of emotion. You know, a lot of people don't like Zweig critics because he's not real modern. He doesn't, he's not real cool and detached and oblique and indirect. There's just, these books are very

painful to read. They're real. He gets down to it. And I found myself certainly in Beware of Pity, as I remember. I had to put the book down a few times, not because I was bored, but because it was all too strong. Wow. Yeah. And then the memoir is the most famous thing maybe he wrote? Yes. It's his summa.

It's an autobiography, but it's also a history of his time. And I've been told for years, it's such a cliche, one of the most tiresome of cliches. It's all there. But by golly, it's kind of all there in politics and culture and so on.

The coming of darkness, of illiberalism, the accommodation of the intellectuals, the capitulation of the intellectuals, the rise of nationalisms, how dislike, reavent hatred can be fanned by demagogues, especially talented demagogues. He saw this and he was a witness in a sense, and he chronicled it absolutely brilliantly. He spent the last many years of his life on this book, and he put it in the post in Brazil,

where he and his wife were living, and the next day, they committed a double suicide. Wow. Now, he lived, as you were telling me, I'd been to Salzburg a few years ago, first time. You go every summer for the music festival. He lived in Salzburg for quite a bit of time. He did. He was a classic Viennese, classic Viennese Jew. After World War I, he couldn't bear to return to Vienna

because he said, let me try somewhere else. Little, tiny, provincial Salzburg, a quiet place in which to work, way out of the way. The festival hadn't started yet. It was tiny. It became famous.

But he lived there, and he wrote, and he lived on the Kaputsinaberg up on a mountain or a very high hill. And he could see with his naked eye Berchtesgaden, the eagle's nest, where Hitler was building his place with his naked eye. And it's true. I mean, it's only about 20 miles away. Yeah, one forgets how far, I forget at least how far west Austria go, how close it is to southern Germany, right? Well, back to Skagen is just over the border. And by the way, this is a diversion. So I guess it's 20 minutes away. And I've been to Salzburg every summer since 02.

A lot of people take excursions to the eagle's nest i'll never go and um i guess it's a personal issue and plenty of people do i just don't want to just don't want to but yeah um uh swag lived there and it got out rather early he he exiled himself to to london long before the and um you're telling me a story so the answer is right like 38 but you're telling me a story of him walking along the the main street in salzburg yeah he tells a story in in uh in his autobiography um he's simply on the street in little Salzburg. I mean, it's so little. I mean, you see everybody.

And he sees a longtime friend, somebody he's known from Vienna, I think, since his youth. And the guy just cuts him off, just ignores him in the street. And the next day, he calls on Zweig at home with no agenda, no reason. It's very unusual for this fellow to do that. And Zweig worked it out, that he had noted Zweig, noticing that he, the other guy, his back was turned to him. And he thought he'd sort of make up for it by visiting Zweig at home. And that lets Zweig know,

huh, it's become dangerous to be seen conversing with Jews in the street. Wow. He left not long after Salzburg. And by the way, Zweig was, you don't ignore Zweig in the street. He was a huge celebrity. He's one of the most famous writers of the day. And according to some assessments, I guess, or evaluations, he was the most translated living writer in all the world. He was very rich.

And his family was well off too, but he made a lot of money himself. And he was the last or one of the last collaborators with Richard Strauss in opera. Well, different world, huh? Yeah. I guess that's sort of the point of the autobiography. That's the point of it. And the fragility of civilization, how quickly it can all go wrong. When everything seems secure and eternal, it's not.

It's one of the great themes. Mona Sharon, our mutual friend and former colleague of yours at National Review, now a colleague of mine at the Bulwark, said she's reading the autobiography on your recommendation, but I haven't had a chance to really ask her how far into it she is and if she's enjoying it as much as you told her she would. I asked Mona many, many years ago. I used to ask people, it was a favorite question of mine, why are you a conservative or how did you become a conservative? I've gotten so many interesting answers. And Mona said, I was aware from a very

young age of the fragility of civilization. How can all go wrong? And very quickly. And she knew this from, you know, reading about the Third Reich and the Holocaust and so on. Yeah. So what do you think? If one wanted to begin Zweig, which I still haven't and I should. I mean, one of the novels or the big book? The World of Yesterday.

The World of Yesterday. The World of Yesterday. Translated into English. I don't have to dust off my one year of college German. And it's a brilliant pen. Zweig is such a stylist. He knew everybody, Bill. He knew all the writers of Europe and all the composers.

All of his contemporaries. And he was a big deal among them. And you learn a lot from this book. It's a beautiful book. He loved America. He came to America on the strength of Walt Whitman. He was so enthralled with Whitman. He wanted to see Whitman's country. And he went to a hotel here in New York. And it's poor, I can imagine that there's this poor Italian immigrant desk clerk and Zweig this clueless Viennese intellectual says, can you tell me

where Walt Whitman is buried? Didn't get much help there. Yeah, yeah. They couldn't Google it back in those days. Well, people should Google your excellent piece or pieces I can't remember on Zweig from when you were discovering him and writing him and writing him.

On my jag. Helping us bring others along on your jag, which is a good deed that you did, incidentally, I think. Did you get much response on Zweig, or is it a little too exotic to have a mass? Lots. It's interesting. It's interesting. People have an appetite for this kind of thing. Yeah.

It shouldn't surprise me anymore because it's pretty predictable and regular is that right yeah I find that people underestimate how much there's a certain class at least of people in America I loved you on Longfellow the other day yeah that's an interesting

another poet who in his case who really was not fashionable among the critics after a certain point. Oh, no. But worth, I don't know, what do I know, but it seems to me worth rediscovering. Oh, heavens, yes. Another conversation.

Last week, someone whom you were a huge admirer of and wrote about very well and several times over the years, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away in Peru at a pretty advanced age, I think. 89. 89, yeah. Tell us about him, and did you know him personally? No, wish I had. I know his son, Alvaro, who is a wonderful classical liberal and writer. But Mario was, I call him Mario as though I'm intimate with him.

He was sort of the one who got away. I was saying in my column the other day that I am not a chaser of people, of things, and so on. I'm just not. And I don't chase interviews. I can take no for an answer. If you tell me no, fine. I'll go on to the next one. There are plenty who are willing. But Vargas, so there are two who have gotten away. One is Jack Nicklaus, the great golfer.

I made a run at him maybe two, three times, which is not real dogged, but for me it is. And Vargas Llosa, I had an opportunity to sit down with him at the Salzburg Festival. He went every year with his family for many years and stayed at the soccer hotel, the main hotel there. And someone said, well, you can meet Vargas Llosa at, say, 3 o'clock or something. I had a contract to attend and cover. And I thought, ah, I can get Vargas Llosa another time. And that other time never came. But he was a great man of letters, a great novelist, a wonderful thinker,

someone who had an influence on a lot of people politically, especially in Latin America. There were two great classical liberals, really, in all of Latin America, Mario Vargas Llosa and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist. They were bosom friends and then had a terrible falling out. He was doing a very sad thing. But Vargas Llosa was, I was saying the other day on something I wrote, it's fairly easy to recognize giants of the past.

It may be harder to recognize them when they're with you. He got a lot of recognition, won the Nobel Prize in literature and so on and so forth. But one of the great writers of our time, a genius. Which of his novels do you recommend to start with and say a word about the recent

nonfiction? Yeah, yeah. Well, a friend of mine, a very generous friend, an Italian friend who comes from New York now and then, he likes to bring me books. And he brought me The Feast of the Goat, a novel by Vargas Llosa about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. And I really wasn't reading novels in that much time, but it's a gift. And I thought I'd read a page or two to tell my friend that I'd read a little of it. And I started this book right shortly before I wanted to go to bed. I think it was about 11.15. And I read the first page.

It was okay. And I read the second page. And it was good. And I read the third page. And I think I fought sleep until about 2.30 in the morning. Wow. And I woke up. I couldn't really move until the book was done. It had me by the throat, by the throat.

And I wasn't an idiot. I knew that Vargas Llosa was a novelist, but I knew him primarily as a political person because my great interests had been political. And so I had done this novel, and I called my friend David Price Jones, who's a real literato and a novelist as well as a political writer, like Vargas Joseph. And I said, David, the guy's a freaking genius. Am I the last to know? And he said very politely, yes, you are. That book is pretty early in his career? No, it's a later book. And I've read, because of the work I've done and the book I wrote, many, many accounts and depictions of dictatorships. Many, many memoirs, histories, so on.

This novel is just about the best. Wow. What it's like to live in, as Robert Conquest would say, a non-consensual society. Just as a digression, but you have written a book on dictators, and maybe more than one, two books, I can't remember anymore, and written so extensively on it also in your columns, and interviewed people, and gone to the conferences, and also dissidents and so forth. And I'm just curious, what else is must-reading for what life is like in a dictatorship? Anything, what are two others come to mind? Yes.

One of the best accounts of a dictatorship I ever read was by a Canadian woman. I think her name is Elizabeth Abbott. She wrote about the Duvaliers in Haiti. She married a member of the Haitian elite. She had access to everyone. And her account of the Duvaliers, especially Papadoc, is just riveting. And also a brilliant English journalist with the name Michaela Wrong, like the English word wrong. She's an Africanist. She's from Oxford or Cambridge, I can't remember. And she wrote an account of the Mobutu dictatorship

in the country that he renamed Zaire. Magnificent, magnificent. Wow. And then- And your friend Natan Sharansky's prison memoir, Fear No Evil. Yeah, that is a wonderful book. I haven't looked at that in quite a while.

I should, yeah. And then the recent book you wrote, what's it, The Call of the Tribe? Is that what it's called? The Call of the Tribe is Mario Vargas Llosa's intellectual autobiography. It's an account of his influences, and it's also a book in which he pays tribute to his influences. He started out on the left, as so many have and do. And then he found people like Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell and Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper and the two great Frenchmen, Aron and Ravel, or two of the great Frenchmen. And they changed him forever.

And toward the end of his life, Vargas Llosa pays tribute to these people for letting him know how best to think. And his great man, all of it, Ortega y Gasset is one of them. But the great figure, the one he starts with, the only non-20th century figure, is Adam Smith. And it sounds a little hokey, but Mario Vargas Llosa

was very far from a sappy, sentimental man. Very far. But he traveled to the little place in Scotland where Smith is buried to lay flowers at his grave. Wow. That's really something. I have not read that. I need to read that. But all those are wonderful writers who, to lay flowers at his grave. Wow. It's really something. Really something.

I have not read that. I need to read that. But all those are wonderful writers who, and I have thought, and you and I have discussed this over the last eight, nine years, I guess now, 10 years almost, the need to rediscover a lot of those writers

who influenced him so much. And I read some of them when I was younger, and certainly influenced my parents and other people of that generation so much. But I don't know, rediscovering these really strong defenders of liberalism in the broad sense of liberalism, I think is so useful today.

I mean, important always, but maybe particularly urgent today. Well, I was saying after Vargas Llosa died, Charles Krauthammer, his life was turned by Isaiah Berlin's four lectures, four essays on liberty, which he read when I think he was 17 and just enrolled at McGill. And he never departed from this. And he said if he could give a gift to every high school graduate, it would be four essays. I would like to place into the hands of everyone the call, the tribe. It's been, I don't

know, seven, eight years, five, six years, I don't know. But I had a lunch with a fairly big group of young people on the right. And they all very much admired the writer Patrick Deneen and his book about the failure of liberalism. And they were all, disciples would be too strong a word, but they were very impressed by him. And which unnerved me a little, but that got me to thinking about the people who impressed me early on. Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, Norman Pod Podhoretz George Will, Robert Conquest so on and so forth

we all have influences of people who help who shape us for good or ill and Vargas Llosa pays marvelous tribute it's a beautiful, beautiful book

it's also an expression of gratitude. What does the title mean, The Call of the Tribe? That's the worst thing about the book. It's the worst thing about the book. To me, the title is completely misleading because the book is about resisting the call of the tribe, resisting tribalism and rising above it. And I think, oh, he's setting, here's a roster of his tribe. Here are his fellow tribesmen. It's his tribe. They're kind of an anti-tribe. And he quotes Popper at length, I think. And Popper was wonderful on the malign influence

of a tribe. A tribe can be good. You know, sometimes you need a tribe, for heaven's sakes, for protection and so on and so forth. But yes, if I could change one thing about the book, it would be its title. Interesting. You also wrote recently about a book that I read decades ago, I will admit, and again, mean to get back to it, haven't now famous again, maybe because of this Netflix series, or I think it's Netflix or one of those. It is Netflix. It is Netflix.

The Leopard by Lampedusa. God, what a book. God, what a book. Well, I can say one word about it, which I remember when I read it, and I think it was maybe in college, it was sort of famous. It had been a movie. It came out in 57 or 58, I think, in Italy. It came out after this aristocrat, Giuseppe de Lampedusa, died.

This was the only novel, only book he wrote. He wasn't a writer. He was a aristocrat, you know, had an estate in Sicily. A reader. He'd been preparing his whole life to disgorge this book.

It's amazing. And he submitted the manuscript. It was rejected by two prestigious Italian publishing houses, if I'm not mistaken. He passed away and then it was printed a year after his death and had a massive success in Italy and translated throughout Europe and here in the U.S.

I think it wasn't that well known here in the U.S. until the movie came out in 1963 with Burt Lancaster. Kind of an odd casting. But anyway, I haven't seen that also in 50 years, so I have no idea how that would stand up. Anyway, it was kind of a cult. Two foreigners are in it. As the leads, they're dubbed Burt Lancaster, the American, and Alain Delon, the Frenchman. It's an Italian movie, but the two of them are dubbed. Weird, huh?

Yeah, right. I should go look at it. It would be an interesting thing to compare it to the current Netflix series. Anyway, I do think the book is always a masterly film. Is that right? Yeah, the book's always been, I think, a little bit of a cult. I don't think it was very hugely known in the 70s, 80s, 90s. No, cult is right.

Cult is right. But kind of among some very much sort of respected or even adored kind of. Say a word about the book. Say a word about the Netflix series. Had you read it years ago or no? In class, in college, Italian class. Oh, wow. A marvelous teacher who's today a dear friend of mine, Maria Rosaria Vitti-Alexander.

And her love for the book wore off on us. And I lapped it up like milk. Now, I must say, I told her this later in life. I did read it side by side with an English translation. Wonderful. But it's a book about the Risorgimento and the giving way of the aristocracy to the new Italy and the kingdom of Sicily to this new country dubbed Italy. And the great famous line from it is, everything must change so that everything can stay the same. Slightly mysterious. I take it to mean you better

accept liberal reforms or the hard men will come and break everything right but he the book has a certain nostalgia for the old regime as well oh very much yeah it's about it's about the author's great-grandfather who was the leopard this is what the the prince of uh well in real life the prince of lampedusa in the book it's the prince of sal well, in real life, the prince of Lampedusa in the book, it's the prince of Salina. He's called the leopard because that's the symbol on his crest. Now, I'm no zoologist, but a gattopardo in Italian is really what we would call a serval or an ocelot rather than a leopard. That's just, that's picayune. And so.

It's probably wise of them to call it the leopard on the other oh much wiser much wiser yeah uh it's what they have in sicily and and north africa or or did have now this is the kind of book you can approach from many angles people like you you know intellectuals uh mansfield students uh you you will you will mine the book for its philosophical insights, its politics, and so on. But also, it's a rip-roaring story about love and sex and human relations and broken hearts and satisfied hearts. And it's just, intellectuals like this book a lot, but so do just plain readers who want just a fabulous story. And the TV series? Oh, marvelous.

Really? Marvelous. Yeah. I don't know really the terms for today. It's a TV series. It makes me think of Norman Lear and all that. Yeah, yeah. What do you call it i don't

know i don't know there's six to me it's a grand old-fashioned movie in six parts six installments on netflix but it has all the bells and whistles it's epic and it is beautiful it is now it takes great liberties and and good for the makers of this, I'll call it a movie. They're honest enough to use the words based on, based on the leopard. But it's still leopard-like enough for my taste. And it's just, it's the leopard, the novel or novella, some people prefer to call it a novella. It's shortish. It is a genuine work of art, literary art. I would say that this

movie I'm calling it is a work, dare I call it a cinematic work of art as well. It's enchanting. Sicily has never looked better. It's so alluring. You can smell everything. The people are beautiful and beautifully shot. And the pain is, you know, there's a lot of love and enthusiasm and warmth in this story, but great pain and horror. And it's, you know, it doesn't spare the viewer anything. There's a lot about class and it's marvelous. Marvelous. Does justice to Lampedusa. I think he'd say, who added all this crap?

But at the same time, good. Well, to before, you know, what was it? You have to change to survive. Yeah, use your own words on him. Or flourish. No, I mean, some truth. I used to be a kind of stickler. I don't like this movie.

It takes liberties. But at some point, one also pretends not to take liberties. It shouldn't take liberties. But at some point, one also has to say it's a different genre. Some things work on print and on the page and don't work visually.

I've become more liberal in my willingness to like both a novel or play, for that matter, and then like the movie or television adaptation of it is that you too or not or maybe yes i think of it no i was but i think of a musical term or a term used in music a paraphrase list would write things use a piano fantasies on operas and ballets and so on and call them paraphrases that's nice nice. He's like, this is not the real thing. I don't think he'd use this language.

This is me riffing, List would say. I mean, we should have a separate conversation on music. And you had a terrific review of the new performance of Figaro, which I hope to go see live at HD on next Saturday. Oh, good. But you saw it live in person there at the Met. But one thing that liberated me a little from my maybe excessive littleness

and wanting works to be exactly as they were, and generally I still have that attitude and I still like, for example, I think the original instruments revolution in classical music was a good thing mostly. It can get carried a little too far perhaps, and there's a place to hear modern orchestra, modern forces, the size of the modern orchestra,

playing some of these older works. But it's also very interesting to hear them the way Mozart would have heard them. It was to discover something I was so ignorant of. Of course, Mozart and everyone else wrote these concertos, which they spent a huge amount of, very important to them, very central to their work. And then they leave parts of it to be improvised, right? The cadenzas by the pianist of the day.

And that's sort of a nice gesture towards this isn't, you know, a hundred percent unchangeable. The operas, I guess, are a little, well, the operas too, though, right? They add arias at different later performances. If there's someone who has a particularly high voice or something, right? You can use your ornamentation and, I guess, are a little... Well, the operas too, though, right? They add arias at different later performances if there's someone who has a particularly high voice or something, right? You can use your ornamentation depending on what your skills are.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's an interesting part. Don't you think of classical music, how much... It is. ...the way to that.

I guess Beethoven, I'd have to look this up. I think he was at least one of the first composers to start writing out cadenzas. Frankly, he was so good at them. Yeah, yeah. He wrote his own. Though I don't know that he insisted that people play his cadenza. It was sort of what he would do as a pianist performing his own concerto, I think. I have a little story to tell you about Joshua Bell, the Hoosier violinist. He had played the Beethoven concerto one night and people were congratulating him on his playing and so on. And I said to him, he had written his own cadenzas for the first movement and the last movement. I said, great cadenzas, which I meant.

And I was so pleased by this because that came from him. Of course, the playing is all him as well. But yeah, it's part of it should be an item in a performer's toolkit. Oh, let me give you a story. A friend of mine from long ago in Ann Arbor, my hometown, he was chairman of the piano department of the University of Michigan. He told me about the time he was a student, and he turned pages for Myra Hess, the great Dame Myra Hess, the British pianist. And Hess in those days, in her last year, she used sheet music. She was worried about memory lapses. She was a great pianist. So they had a quick conversation in the green room beforehand.

And Dame Myra says to my guy, so what are you working on? And he names them Mozart and Curator. And, um, uh, Dave Myra says, Oh, great. Whose cadendas are you using? And my guy gulps and says, well, I've written my own. And Myra Hess says to this 20 year old, the following words, Oh, that's wonderful. I'm not gifted that way. I've always liked, I don't know anything about, I'm not capable of judging really these different pianists as you are, but I've heard some of her

performances on records, we used to say, CDs, or now on YouTube. But she was, if I'm not mistaken, I always liked her also because I think she, I'm sure I have this a little wrong, she performed every week, every month, I don't know, during World War II on the BBC, I think.

I mean, I think live in London, but maybe it was also carried on the BBC for the British people, sort of, to give them. During the Blitz. Yeah. Am I right that this was sort of famous at the time? Very famous. At some risk to herself. Oh, yes. Windows were blown out.

Absolutely. Yeah. It was a great thing. Near heroic thing. And it meant a lot to people. It meant a lot for their morale. And Hest, she played on the series herself, but she was the organizer and the mover behind this series.

I knew this. Yes. That's a good note. A patriotic person and a noble woman. Yeah, that's a good note to end on in the current moment. We'll get back and have a music discussion and a poetry woman. Yeah. That's a good note to end on in the current moment. We'll get back and have a music discussion and a poetry discussion sometime soon. But maybe I'll end instead with Mozart, just out of deference to Mozart.

And in your review, you have a wonderful quote of a friend of yours. You took a friend of yours to Figaro. My dear friend, Hirsch Patel, who was at the time captain of the Eurysia Michigan golf team this is long ago and uh there was a performance of the marriage of Figaro I think at the power center maybe in my hometown Ann Arbor and I took uh Hirsch the orchestra played the overture and he turned to me in a whisper and said that's's the best thing I've ever heard. And I thought, well, it's kind of a shame because it's all downhill from there. Right. I mean, he could listen to music for the next 50, 60, 100 years and never get better. You didn't say it, but you thought of saying it.

Maybe the best thing you'll, probably the best thing you'll ever hear. Yes. But of course, Mozart had many, many more more they were just falling out of his pocket no i know falling out of his pocket is the overture better than the concluding you know extremely long ensemble to act two of figueroa i don't know that's no not well nothing in the world is better than that yeah that's sort of world nothing in the world is better than the finale of Act II. Yeah, it's a great thing. I'll quote to you Riccardo Muti, with whom I've done several podcasts.

His two favorite operas are Cuisine Fantute and Falstaff. But he agreed with me, at least upon being pressed, that Cuisine Fantute was flawed. But he was quick to say, but the Marriage of Figaro, I don't do accents, I'll just say it my way, is perfect, he said. Perfect. Yeah. And inspired Richard Strauss to write Der Rosenkavalier, which is his Viennese Marriage of Figaro. A good note to

end on. We've avoided the topic we spend most of our days obsessing, correctly obsessing about, I'm going to say, but it was great to get away from it for 35 minutes here on a Sunday. And Jay, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you for being Bill Crystal.

No, it's been great to have you here. You're a chip off of both of your blocks. Well, that's so nice of you to say, and I appreciate it. And thank you all for joining us on The Bulwark on Sunday.