Bayham Street: Essays in Longing is a neither a memoir nor a collection of personal essays, but a book of near confessions that document--sometimes in tragedy, sometimes in comedy, but always poignantly--its author's faltering search for beauty and meaning by way of art, faith, eros, and memory. Ranging in subject from art to music to literature to philosophy and in locale from Minnesota to Italy to former-Soviet Europe, Clark pursues the track of his artistic and intellectual heroes, only to discover, as often as not, ...
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Bayham Street: Essays in Longing is a neither a memoir nor a collection of personal essays, but a book of near confessions that document--sometimes in tragedy, sometimes in comedy, but always poignantly--its author's faltering search for beauty and meaning by way of art, faith, eros, and memory. Ranging in subject from art to music to literature to philosophy and in locale from Minnesota to Italy to former-Soviet Europe, Clark pursues the track of his artistic and intellectual heroes, only to discover, as often as not, their feet of clay. Raised to worship figures as disparate as Beethoven and Arthur Godfrey and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Leonard Bernstein, Clark follows in their tracks, and their biographies become the templates for his own. In the book's concluding chapter his stubborn, frustrated, and seemingly pointless search for the boyhood home of Charles Dickens intersects with his quest to discover the story of an elder sister who vanished into an institution as a toddler.
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