Do you ever read an article and have a phrase jump out and get you thinking about something different?
That happened to me recently when I was reading a profile of fashion designer Anna Sui in a recent edition of "T, the New York Times Style Magazine."
The clothes she makes aren’t totems of some inaccessibly glamorous life but an invitation: to join the party, to be one of those girls, careless of time and most alive in a crowd, in the crush and heave of friends and strangers who by the end of the night will also be friends.
"One of those girls, careless of time" is the phrase that jumped out at me and got me thinking of an outstanding performance of George Fredrick Handel's first oratorio, "The Triumph of Time," which premiered in 1707 in Rome. The performance was by Seattle-based Pacific Musicworks and you can listen to it by clicking on that link.
The libretto, a cautionary tale, was written by a Catholic Cardinal named Benedetto Pamphili. In essence, beautiful women are warned against devoting themselves to earthly pleasure and urged to instead make them themselves fit for heaven before it is too late. Delay is dangerous because Time will inevitably triumph.
Could an Anna Sui dress be dangerous, making a woman "careless of time" in the vein of Handel's oratorio? Or perhaps the author had something else in mind when penning that phrase, but what could it be?
Time, of course, does eventually triumph when it comes to mortals and Handel, himself, eventually succumbed. Interestingly, a revised version of "The Triumph of Time," with the libretto reworked into English by Thomas Morell, was performed in 1757 when Handel was blind. He died in 1759.
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