heedlessness

Not for these reveling lovers the swelling strings of Henry Mancini, who scored the film; in the cocktail-mixing song “Evanesce,” Guettel gives them bright, fast music, frenetic and danceable — and when they do a bit of soft-shoe in salt spilled on the floor, there’s a playful heedlessness to their sandpaper percussion.

The art historian Lawrence Gowing describes it as a certain heedlessness of subject, a certain faithfulness to pure appearance: “Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light.”

The consequences of heedlessness are dire and all around us: the heated planet, the worsening droughts and storms, the fires, the clogged air, the poisoned water.

Heedlessness is self-defeating for the Biden administration, which has faced an unprecedented flood of illegal border crossers over the past year, including waves of Haitians.

The Biden administration’s heedlessness has been compounded by its ongoing campaign of deportations; to date, it has flown more than 26,000 Haitian border crossers back to their native country, in most cases without allowing them to apply for asylum.