There is no sign of humanity in this painting, no face at a window, and yet everything that we see before our eyes – except for those fleeting snatches of blue sky, and they seem to be hurrying away – is relentlessly, pitilessly man-made, and none of it is pretty or delicate or elegant or beautiful or lightsome.
It feels morally weightless, gorgeously fanciful, a lightsome, sumptuously decorated simulacrum of this serious world of good and evil.
These balloons have been set loose as mischief-makers, lightening the threat of sculptural severity, giving a lightsome, fantastical air to what might otherwise have been gravely pinioned.
Best of all, though, are the dozen lightsome, loving numbers that Hodges and Webster, the Master and the Disciple, recorded with a rhythm section in 1960, among them "Dual Highway," "Ifida," and "I'd Be There" — three instances of the secret language that jazz musicians often speak.
Sentimentalism, of course, must breed a sluggish spirit - just as wit insists on lightsome speed.
Buoyant and lightsome, he was also courageous and dutiful.
Lightsome Curry, so relatable, in the current Hollywood parlance, only seems to have made the load on LeBron James's shoulders that much heavier.
Had I recently reread the poem "Inversnaid," say, I would have more readily grasped why Mariani would write about Hopkins, "His heart opens to the lightsome fawn-froth of the beadbonny stream twindling over the dark waters below"; as it happened, I was puzzled until I came to the poem itself, as quoted by Mariani, in which the words "fawn-froth," "beadbonny" and "twindles" appear.
He is with his narrator's mother, Julia, as she watches her children grow up and leave, asking "Where has it gone, her lightsome youth, her proud and glad insouciance, and how has she come to this pass?" He is with her much later, and very beautifully, in realizing that 10 years into the future the slow movement of "Death and the Maiden" will be played at her funeral.
This isn't meant to underestimate the band's attempt to engage the body on "Standards" (Thrill Jockey), its latest and most lightsome album.
