“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys – 1966

 

 “Here, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson presents not just a feel-good, puppy-love pop song, but an expression of the most elemental human desire. The whole composition, marvelously complex in its orchestration, and yet strikingly short and simple, begs for a love that is endless, infinite, and yet mediated in a finite, particular way. It is a miracle of songwriting, a microcosm of a whole life’s yearning.”

 

“Septology” by Jon Fosse – 2022

 

“Why would you want to read a three-volume novel written in a single, stream-of-consciousness sentence? As unlikely as it sounds, the novel is marvelously successful in its goal of communicating a single man’s interior life, composed of present tense experience, memories of his deceased wife, mystical prayer, musings on his vocation as a painter, and imagined vignettes from the lives of his friends. Fosse, our most recent Nobel laureate, weaves all these strands together in a beautiful work of ‘mystical realism.’ The work unfolds in contemporary rural Norway, but its true setting is the human heart.”

 

“Magnolia” – 1999

 

“Anderson’s film is Dickensian in the rich intermingling of its multiple plots, and yet it follows the modernist path of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in withholding easy answers to the questions it raises: what chance do we have escaping, or at least dealing with, the traumas of the past? What will it take to hear the hard truths about others’ lives, and our own? What kind of solution can be offered in the face of the generational iniquities of the world? The multiple side-by-side plotlines of ‘Magnolia’ weave together into a single, embodied response.”