Tango has waited for me at thirty, confirming Troilo's prediction. And it has been, for the past three years, the matrix of my life, structuring it beyond reasonabe. Why tango, they sometimes ask me, and the best answer I come up with is that tango is a unique blend of intimacy and beauty, like I have not encountered elsewhere, never so intense and reliable. Perhaps, making music with somebody else - a violin and a piano - can be as intimate and beautiful as dancing tango; this is out of my reach. A few conversations have been like that - but these are even less reproducible than "tango moments".
But, unlike music and conversations, enjoying tango at its fullest calls for a kind of basic moral ability which I believe is itself elusive: to accept, perhaps even to love, people, for what they are at a particular moment. There is no way you can dance tango and ignore your partners, they are too close and you are too dependent on them as they make your dance possible. Sometimes I try to do the ignoring, ready to pay the price of a mechanical dance, but I believe not even then it is possible to entirely shun knowledge of the other.
This tender acceptance can perhaps be cultivated, but there is nothing to guarantee it. Sometimes I become misanthropic.
What hooked me to tango at first was its most obvious and glowing side, the intimacy. But what keeps me going is beauty.
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