I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless, and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she’d accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through trails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the
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Pondering her fascination with “how and when . . . Star [learned] Mozart’s motif,” the author imagined,
“I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless, and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she’d accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through trails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail with whatever bread crumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an almost magical combination of urgency and patience. There were just enough crumbs in the Mozart story that I felt confident that, with enough sleuthing, the details of just how the Mozart-and-Star story unfolded would fill my grail chalice. Naturally, that is not at all what happened.”
