James Allen Hall
speaker
2,199 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 10 Aug
James Allen Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Sometimes, remembering those days, I watch a warm, dry wind bothering a whole line of elms and maples along a street in this neighborhood until they're all moving at once, until I feel just like them, trembling and in unison.
None of this matters now.
But I never felt alone all that year.
And if I had sorrows, I also had laughter, the affliction of angels and children.
which can set a whole house on fire if you'd let it.
And even then, you might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free in one long choir ring of flames that sang only to you, either because no one else could hear them or because no one else wanted to.
And mostly because they know.
They know such music cannot last and that it would tear them apart if they listened.
In those days, I was, in fact, already married.
just as I am now, although to another woman.
And that day I could have stayed in New York.
I had friends there.
I could have stayed up Lexington Avenue or down to Third and caught a faint glistening of the sea between the buildings.
But all I wanted was to hold her all morning, until her body was, again, a bright field, or until we both reached some thicket, as if at the end of a lane, or at the end of all desire.
And where we could therefore be alone again, and make some dignity out of loneliness.
As mostly, people cannot do.
Billie Holiday, whose life was shorter and more humiliating than my own, would have understood all this, if only because even in her late addiction and her bloodstream's hallelujahs, she too sang often of some affair or someone gone and therefore permanent.
And sometimes she sang for nothing, and even then, and it isn't anyone's business if she did.
That morning, when she asked me to leave, wearing only that apricot-tinted, fraying chemise, I wanted to stay.
But I also wanted to go.
Showing 681–700 of 2,199 · page 35 of 110
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