singing a refrain—”En este mundo de tristeza”—whenever he gets a moment, and he’s never made the connection to the original, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which is, after all, tonally distinct in every facet, a song without sadness, or a song that denies sadness in a world that—and you can say this objectively—is indeed full of it. Mention Sinatra and he might come up with “Fly Me to the Moon” and “New York, New York” but the real reason he knows Ol’ Blue Eyes is a scene in a movie his mom once showed him where Frank fans out an entire deck of playing cards and every single one is the queen of diamonds.
Put yourself on set back then: No shortcuts, no CGI or post-production, and so: some intern going to multiple stores to buy 52 decks of cards and plucking out the queens in question to create this super deck, and it’s kind of sad, to use the word, that something like that could never occur naturally in nature, where, as the second law of thermodynamics tells us, order never spontaneously triumphs, where our lives can be reduced to the ways in which we are dams holding back the flood, but that’s the thing about the bright-sider, the optimist, this Sisyphusian task is beautiful to him in its futility.
In any case, lyrics matter less than associations, which by now, for him, over the course of hundreds of listens, are many things at once jumbled together, or the possibility of many things, and each evocation randomly selects one, like the spinning wheel in a carnival game: One of the first times he heard the song, for example, at a friend’s cabin over the winter holidays in high school, sleet falling on the cabin roof, everyone dozing but not yet asleep, and during the mournful chorus he reached up blindly to present his outstretched fingers, and the girl sitting in the armchair near him, without a moment’s confusion, took his hand, and no one else in the darkened, sleet-surrounded room knew.
Maybe one of the most optimistic things you can do is befriend sadness, appreciate it’s redeeming qualities, the way it makes lost things luminous, puts them in perfect order, dips them in amber, so they can’t be retrieved but are forever preserved.
For all the bright-sider knows, that cabin is no longer there (sweet sadness), not because it was not well constructed or because it was at any great risk of disaster, but because he has lost touch with those friends, and any place we’ve been to once in our lives and are likely never to go to again might as well not exist—we can neither confirm nor deny its existence—and you could imagine, as he sometimes does, that the world and its myriad places only spring up when needed, like the unexplored terrain in a computer game, a landscape not yet populated, and who could blame the world if it conserved energy like that, if it fought the disorder that way, and anyway might it not be more exciting to think that the earth invents itself for us, made to order, any time we stray from the expected path?
He’s not a good singer, has musical appreciation but not aptitude, and the multiple notes in tristeza would be hard for anyone, but that’s never stopped him from trying, from writing lyrics in the margins of papers and from once, idly, carving them into a classroom table in Sunday school, which earned him a ruler and the equivalent of detention. He was taken to some obscure administrative office, a place he never visited ever again and that no longer exists, and what he had to do was alphabetize some papers, what he had to do was bring order to the universe, the way God never did, a task in this case that would have taken little time if he applied himself, but instead he laid out the papers around himself in a semi-circle and regarded them as if they were the collected moments of his life, some already lived and most still to come, some transcendent and some routine, the array like a deck of cards presented only to him, like all the eventualities of a life on earth, only in this game he didn’t have to pick just one, he could have them all.
