So I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity
to live in Italy for a bit.
And when I was there, I came across a composer
by the name of Paul Rudy.
And I got to be quite good friends with him.
So we would go on walks throughout Rome
and talk about music and what music could do
and where you could find it.
So when I was diagnosed, I called him
and I said, hey, Paul, if I was a piece of music,
what would I be?
And so he wrote me.
I mean, he literally wrote me.
So that is what I would look like if I
were a piece of music.
[LAUGHTER]
And he was nice enough to give us this sheet music.
So in the final book, the funnest piece of the book
will be the sheet music that is Jay Hopler.
Let me see if I can find this poem here.
All right, a new book, I have no idea where anything is.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, so Paul and I, and some of our friends,
found us wandering the streets of Arezzo, Italy,
in the middle of a very cold night.
And as we were out there, we found an escalator that
was outdoors still running.
And it was squeaking in this really
kind of eerie, weird way.
Paul, being the composer that he is, has perfect pitch.
And he immediately knew what note
that was and began to record it to do a piece of music
later with that.
So this poem is about the night that Paul and I
found this escalator and the music that it became.
It's called, After the Diagnosis, Meditation
on the Origins of Death's Thin Melody II,
Variations on an Escalator, by Paul Rudy.
"Arezzo, middle of a Sunday night in February,
the city is silent, save a hillside escalator moaning
its rust to the ice mist.
P said the sound made him think of a solitary monk wandering
the Tuscan hills.
A said it sounded like the world's oldest novice
polishing an Oculus.
S said there was something of the sea about it,
a widow's walk with widow walking.
T said it sounded like Priapus having his way with a Grecian
urn, but the sound was more forlorn.
A sub destroyer's sonar ping beating the hull out
of a submarine, or a hearse with a bad axle squeaking its grief
all the way to the graveside, no line of mourners
following behind--
I said nothing of the kind."