July 27, 2012

Near misses, for good or ill, leave one breathless. Sometimes it’s in life, sometimes it’s in an instant, sometimes in an event you can control, sometimes in one you can’t. An instinctual swerve to avoid another’s driving mistake, a concert that holds an exultant best result, an X-ray that shows the feared is indeed not there. As the Olympics open we can expect to see many near misses and the opposite, those tiny margins of victory. But for me it’s the others, in art, in life, nearly always untelevised, that are the ones that really matter.

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