Culture

ABBA. The peak of the Friday night feeling - fully alive in the moment, young and sweet, only seventeen forever.

Pharrell Williams. Vitality as a contagious, generous, ridiculous gift. The song that it is almost physically impossible to hear without smiling.

Queen. Freddie Mercury at escape velocity - vitality at its most incandescent and unstoppable.

Five figures in a circle, hands clasped, bodies in motion - faces gone in the movement. Pure physical joy. The painting vibrates with the sound it would make if it could make one.

Hundreds of lights reflected in mirrored walls, extending in every direction without edge. Vitality as immersion - the self dissolved into a field of aliveness that has no boundary and no end.

A teenage girl who was supposed to die in the first episode and ran for seven seasons. Vitality as defiance - the refusal to be the victim the narrative has prepared for you.

Laura Esquivel's novel where a woman's vitality - her longing, her passion, her grief - transmits itself into the food she cooks. Aliveness as something that flows from person to person, whether you intend it or not.

George Wein creating a space where jazz could be heard outdoors, in daylight, by mixed audiences. Vitality as access - the music finally given the room it had always deserved.

Cher Horowitz, completely and unselfconsciously alive in her own world. Vitality as the quality of someone who has not yet been talked out of their own enthusiasm by the world's collective disapproval.

Lizzo. Vitality as self-determination - the song that makes you stand up straighter just by listening. The declaration that aliveness is not conditional on anyone else's approval.

A room-length painting for a Vienna Secession exhibition - the hostile forces, the weak humanity, and the Joy that arrives in the final panel as a choir of golden figures. Vitality as the thing that survives everything sent to extinguish it.

The god of wild places, music, and sudden irrational joy. Pan's music produces panic in open fields and ecstasy in groves. Vitality as the force that arrives uninvited from nature, from music, from the moment you stop trying to control your own response.

The night after MLK's assassination, city officials wanted to cancel the concert. Brown insisted on playing. The broadcast kept Boston off the streets. Vitality as a civic act - the music that held a city together when everything was about to come apart.