Tremor: A Novel

We live on the accumulated ruins of experience.

The great conversation has become a monologue.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.