More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No. Not got in. That’s the wrong way of putting it. Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.
Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.
I got her to play two strings, back and forth, plucking at a quickening pace, along with my heart. I touched her arm. I closed my eyes, and felt fearful of how much I felt for her. ‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’ When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, ‘I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all
...more
‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’
To talk about memories is to live them a little.
Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.
It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.
Maybe it is because I still remember the size of things. No one understands that any more. People didn’t feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.
‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’
