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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.