It can't be for everyone, certainly not when someone writes a book about opera, is it alive or dead? and the reviewer brings up Schrodinger's cat. Erwin Schrodinger, who likely lived next door to someone, but not us. In fact, he may not have even had a cat.
The book is 'A History of Opera' by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. Apparently in this book the reviewer Zachary Woolfe tells us, the life and death of opera is somewhat like Schrodinger's cat paradox, in which it can't be determined if the cat is alive or dead after being in a box with a Geiger counter and a radioactive isotope.
It gets easier to understand when you find that in 1935 Erwin Schrodinger posed a thought paradox having to do with quantum mechanics asking: when does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other? Then there's the technical way to say it. It is a famous thought experiment that apparently I was absent for during some part of my education.
The cat and the box didn't really happen (I don't think) but was merely advanced as a hypothetical situation to illustrate the paradox.
This might be why opera is failing. (Or is it?) You have to have an advanced degree in physics to understand the people who write about it.
All this is consistent with the woman who lives in the Osborne apartments who said that the construction crane that came loose during hurricane Sandy and upset life on 57th Street and the vicinitty for some time, sounded like the beheading of St. John the Baptist.
'Salome.' An opera.
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