The Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov recalled that [Henry] Kessler viewed works of art as “living creatures belonging to the same species as himself.” The creation animated him even more than the creator, and this is what lifts his diaries far above the level of gossip. He writes wonderfully of the importance of revisiting the deepest works at different stages of one’s life, for they will change appearance, “like medieval cathedrals at different times of the day.” Make haste when you are young, he advises, or “it is too late, and you have missed the morning light of the masterpieces.” Such light floods the journals of Kessler’s youth, when he believed that one painting or poem could change the world.
—The New Yorker, p. 78, “The Diary of an Aesthete” by Alex Ross.
