Tremor: A Novel

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The great conversation has become a monologue.

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