Tremor: A Novel

Intimacy and grandeur: both are woven into the prehistory of music, both have survived through its history. All this affects our listening now at the far end of that history.

Walking at night is a consolation unless you’re worried about violence. Otherwise the night is a lightly woven blanket which covers and soothes. The source of its beauty is the same as the source of its danger: everything that exists in daytime exists at night but is now seen with a shallow depth-of-field or with a dimmer.

Who knows what’s happening in someone else’s head? He cannot with any confidence say what’s happening in his own head.

The great conversation has become a monologue.

When possible he wants to listen and receive the music in his body before he gives it a name.

People like him show that a deeper intimacy with nature is possible and that this intimacy does not have to rely on the obliterative arrogance of Western culture.

What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art? And this brings me again to the annotation I found

there’s the stubborn gap between what he is able to think and what he is able to do.

We worry about close calls for the ones we love including the close calls they had long before we even knew they existed.

We forget the Slave Ship, we must forget the Slave Ship in the way we must forget many difficult things with the kind of forgetfulness that allows us to keep on living our lives.