“My husband makes things that live forever.”
“Then he must be a fool.”

I’ve been doing a bit of work on my new play “The Rake’s Visit: A One-Act Capriccio on a Theme from Don Giovanni,” about a fictional meeting between Giacomo Casanova and Constanze Mozart (downloadable here). These new lines come right after a playful improvisation in which Giacomo and Constanze create a little “opera” set in a beautiful place where people live truly free and creative lives:

GIACOMO.
But you are crying.

CONSTANZE.
It’s nothing.

GIACOMO.
Tell me.

CONSTANZE.
Am I dreaming—or am I dying?
It must be one or the other.
Here we are, the two of us together,
and I don’t believe I’ve ever felt so lost—
or so lonely.

GIACOMO.
Have you never felt it before—
this loneliness that must be shared by two?
It is the bitterest loneliness of all—
and also the loveliest.

CONSTANZE.
It’s sad—so sad.
Soon we’ll forget—all this ever happened—
this—this warmth of the brandy in our throats,
this yeasty aroma of fresh-baked stories,
the taste and—and tempo of our words—
this moment will die.

GIACOMO.
As all moments must and shall.
That is what moments are for,
to abide and then to perish,
and thank God for it.
We breathe, and then surrender every breath.
We light a candle, and we snuff it with a pinch of dampened fingers.
So it is with our lives, yours and mine and everybody’s.
A life without death would not be worth living.
Death is what gives life meaning, gives it …

CONSTANZE.
Shape?

GIACOMO.
The very thing.
Death is the boundary that holds us back
from formlessness and void.

CONSTANZE.
My husband makes things that live forever.

GIACOMO.
Then he must be a fool.
I myself am writing my own life story,
from beginning to end—
my joys and sorrows,
masterstrokes and blunders,
triumphs and debacles,
feats of magic, feats of fraud,
mortifications manifold and glories ever-fleeting,
and, oh yes, ladies, ladies, ladies—
in dozens of volumes, thousands of pages, millions of words—
and my greatest fear is that I’ll die
before I get the chance to burn them all,
every last scrap of ink on paper,
unread by any living soul …

—Wim