Tremor: A Novel

lineage is a forest of forking paths.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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