Tremor: A Novel

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

We live on the accumulated ruins of experience.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.