Tremor: A Novel

lineage is a forest of forking paths.

Death in human life only makes sense when death has been acknowledged. It is not a raw biological fact, not for humans. Death is knowledge of death, death is the ritual for the dead. This is why when we hear someone has died we always want to know how it happened: because in order to begin to absorb the pain of the loss we need a narrative. Acknowl

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

We want whatever it is that can help us draw the absent shape, we look for more information, more data points, an ever-greater accumulation of stories and remembrances. But the quest is never finished, the one who went away never returns. Slowly the bank of stories is depleted. The memories evaporate.

Everyone arrives at knowledge of the world from a personal point of view and is not the poorer for it. Each person understands life on the basis of small personal events. Firsthand experience is what matters. It is by being grounded in what we know and what we have experienced that we can move out into greater complexities.

In those moments when the listening is shallow he perceives a distance between what he hears and what it means.

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.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help.

The moment will come when the one facing the greatest suffering is me. I will have to understand that my suffering has no greater meaning. I will have to accept the fact of my own extinction, will have to understand that my appearance, my voice, my gait, my preferences, and my mannerisms not to mention the innumerable nebulous traits that constitut

The music interprets him. That shadowy voice and those unamplified guitars set a contour around his body and he becomes legible again to himself.