A sudden downpour caused us to take shelter under the marquee of the Plaza early the other afternoon, and within a couple of seconds we were joined by a very tall and thoroughly drenched young man, whom we recognized as Van Cliburn. A reporter in fair weather or foul, we promptly introduced ourself. “This rain isn’t going to stop, ever,” Cliburn said, peering dolefully out into the flooded street and trying, in vain, to restore the creases in his wet trousers with thumb and forefinger. “Let’s go sit in the Oak Room and have some soup.”…

Over soup—it turned out to be onion soup au gratin—Cliburn spoke rather wryly of success and its seductions. “People really do believe that Rome was built in a day,” he said. “As soon as you’ve made a splash, everybody wants you to do everything at once, at any cost. A man’s loneliest hours begin when public recognition begins…. It seems to me that there are three roads a person can take in playing the piano, and only one of them is the right one. A pianist may go wrong by ignoring the hard truth that his own, sole satisfaction is to be the supreme test of everything he attempts, or he may go wrong by associating himself with one sort of music and forming a kind of society for it, on the craven assumption that that is the only sort of music he is capable of playing. The third road is to struggle all one’s life to master every corner of the immensely complex realm of music—to search and search, and maybe never find.”

Somewhat dazed by this burst of eloquence, we pressed Cliburn to tell us how, in an era of unrelenting publicity and no privacy, he managed to keep himself on the third road. “Divine indifference,” he said, polishing off the last of his soup with relish. “Swami Vivekananda says it is divine indifference that urges men to quality for building an ideal. The Buddhist says ‘Neti! Neti!’—‘Not this! Not that!’ I suppose one could call it unconcern. Prestige or simple recognition is often mistaken for success. Nothing could be further from the truth. For me, the greatest possible success would be to be utterly alone without feeling the need to talk to anyone. You can achieve this only when you achieve control over a fixed idea.” Cliburn jumped restlessly to his feet, his cheerful young face floating high above us, halfway to the Oak Room ceiling. “I wonder if the rain has stopped,” he said.