Tremor: A Novel

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.

We live on the accumulated ruins of experience.

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

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

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

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 great conversation has become a monologue.

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.

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