By Stuart Mitchner

It feels like we are in a movie…

— resident of Tehran, quoted in The New York Times

Friday night we’re streaming the Season 3 finale of the Apple-TV series Tehran, in which a massive traffic jam complicates the climactic pursuit of a van carrying an atomic bomb timed to go off at noon. Saturday morning the Times’ online coverage (“Chaos and Panic Grip Tehran as Airstrikes Shake City”) includes real-life shots of a massive traffic jam. By the time Ayatollah Khamenei is reported dead, my wife and I are still mourning the most compelling and conflicted character in the series, Faraz Kamali, memorably played by the American actor, Tehran-born Shaun Toub.

Art in Life

The Times map of targeted sites showing the underground missile facility at Kermanshah dotted in red brought to mind the art in life moment when my west-bound bus approached that city as I was reading about it in a poem by Archibald MacLeish: “And now at Kermanshah the gate / Dark empty and the withered grass / And through the twilight now the late / Few travelers in the westward pass.”

In memory of that, for me, remarkable moment, I saved the book — an “ungently used” pocket edition of the Golden Treasury of Verse — until it finally fell apart.

“Wuthering Heights”

In the week before the Times coverage of the attack on Iran, the online edition ran a handsomely illustrated feature (“What Brontë Country Tells Us About Britain Today”) set on the “wide-open moors” of West Yorkshire and Haworth, the English village where Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, “the gothic romance that inspired Hollywood’s latest steamy adaptation.” The story includes another map with red dots, in this case indicating Haworth, a thriving center for literary tourism thanks to the Brontës, and nearby Bradford, once “a wealthy, fast-growing center of textile manufacturing,” now a city whose “decline is typical of the hollowing-out of many postindustrial towns and cities in northern England, fueling the poverty and frustration that are shaking up British politics.” A photograph accompanying the article shows a building topped by a red neon “City of Dreams” sign, underscoring the fact that Bradford was recently named Britain’s “city of culture,” with the government “providing money and support for a year of events to highlight its cultural heritage and to inspire tourists to visit.”

Another cherished, picturesquely battered volume I saved from those days on the road was a paperback edition of Wuthering Heights with a cover depicting Cathy in apparent flight from Heathcliffe, who looms ominously in the background. Except for the “steamy adaptation” reference, the Times article ignores the Gothic romance played to the hilt and over the top by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Emerald Fennell’s new film, wherein Elordi transitions from Mary Shelley’s Creature to Emily Brontë’s. The article’s brief quote from Juliet Barker’s passionately titled 979-page tome The Brontës Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family (Pegasus 2010) provides only the first two words of the title, making no mention of Heathcliffe, nor of the “drunken debauchery, casual cruelty and passionate love” that actually originated in the Gondal world created by the youngest sisters, Emily and Anne. Barker’s title is echoed in one of the book’s only passages about Emily’s authorship of Wuthering Heights, which was delivered “to an uncomprehending public without preface, introduction or explanation” and then “was left to Charlotte, ever her sister’s apologist, to insist that it was simply a tale of the ‘wild moors of the north of England; produced by a ‘homebred country girl.’”

“Let Me In!”

Except for the Project Gutenberg version of Wuthering Heights, the only actual “hard copy” I own is from a rare set published in England in 1922 as The Novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac. So it goes with rare books (this set priced from $700 to $3,000 online), a “reading copy” is almost always preferred. Opening the 1922 edition at random, I was stopped cold by a Dulac image of Heathcliff gazing out an open window, captioned “’Come In! Come In’ He Sobbed.”

Rereading that “unforgettable” passage, I’d forgotten that the character with whom the reader first feels the touch of Cathy’s icy hand and hears her cry “Let me in! I’m come home. I lost my way on the moor!” is not Heathcliffe but Mr. Lockwood, the narrator, who has already been rudely treated by his landlord Heathcliffe and a young woman Lockwood mistakenly assumes is his wife, who expresses herself even “more repellingly.” Writing about Emily Brontë on the 200th anniversary of her birth, I detected hints of a self-portrait in the rude behavior of the young woman, since contemporary accounts of the author described her as “not timid” but “the reverse” with nothing but “contempt for the enervating banality of social discourse.” As sister Charlotte put it: “A solitude loving raven, no gentle dove.”

Cathy and Kate

One day in the mid-1980s, I’m washing dishes, music’s playing in the next room, my 6-year-old son’s listening to a Pat Benatar album. But what’s this? — “windy moors,” “too hot, too greedy,” “hated you, loved you,” “bad dreams in the night,” then “Heathcliffe, it’s me, Cathy, I’m so cold, let me in your window.”

I turn off the water. This is Pat Benatar? “Ooo, it gets dark, it gets lonely, on the other side from you … cruel Heathcliffe, my one dream, my only master.”

Pat Benatar? Someone has written an incredible song about the moment at the core of Wuthering Heights that rises and falls with the chorus, the words of the title, and it’s chilling because, really, it’s as if someone had translated the emotional essence of a full novel into a song. When I examine the label of the album, the composer is K. Bush.

In fact, Kate Bush, whose music recently surfaced in the hit series Stranger Things, was born Catherine, grew up Cathy, a connection formed at birth, Emily on July 30, 1818, Kate on July 30, 1958.

March 4

The fact that I’d forgotten that noteworthy birthdate coincidence reminds me that the most remarkable person born on today’s date, March 4, was the composer Vivaldi, fondly known in our house as “Baldy” when my son was a toddler (he’ll turn 50 in April), his favorite music, next to the Beatles, being The Seasons. According to Wikipedia, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678, and died July 28, 1741, aged 63, in Vienna in a house owned by the widow of a saddlemaker.

That Vivaldi remains very much alive in the world today is evident in the film we saw the night before Tehran, Jean-Pierre Melville’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (1950), streaming on the Criterion Channel. As it happens, “streaming” comes close to describing the way Vivaldi’s music propels the rapid flow of the narrative, the energy of the two siblings and their games. Cocteau wanted jazz but Melville convinced him to use Vivaldi’s concertos for violin, four violins and cello, and two violins and string orchestra.

John Lennon

My son keeps surfacing, can’t be helped. Pat Benatar was rudely dispatched not long after I introduced him to Kate Bush. How he got from Vivaldi to Benatar, I have no idea except that the one constant from birth had been the music of the Beatles, until the 10 years following the murder of John Lennon, when all the Fab Four’s albums had to be put away. Look up the date March 4, 1966 on Wikipedia’s roster of Notable Events and you find that was the day when Lennon suggested to the London Evening Standard that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” which led to the burning of Beatles albums in the American south set off by a few words taken out of context.