Status Updates From English Music

"'There is nothing to be afraid of. There is no darkness. When you brood on the future like this, you're just taking yourself away from the real world. You're entering some tiny space where all your fears are hidden, and that's where the darkness really lies.'"

" 'It is in the character of the artist,' he explained, to trace the changes in the human form before it crumbles into dust. It is not in his power to change sublunary nature, or relieve the world at once from misery and cruelty. Look around you ... I may order them into their appropriate forms, as I have explained to you, but I cannot ever obliterate them.' "

“At the moment of my death will I comprehend the musique of the spheres, which all my life I have strained to hear? Will I be taken up into the empyrean, of which I have sought the traces within the muddy vesture of this earth? If so I sit upon thorns until I be gone, gone into that region of harmony whence all our musique derives.”

"Never forget these books, and out of them you may build your own barricade against sorrow. I know of your misery and your abandonment, for how else might you have reached this island? But think not where you are or where you may go, since, with these books, you are in England, every where and under any meridian. Darkness may bury your eyes, but not your imagination."

But could the atmosphere of a life, the meaning of a past, be removed as easily as the furniture and rugs? Even then I sensed that this was not so, that a harder and somehow more impersonal residue was left behind. The mornings of study, the evenings by the fire, the conversations, the silent companionship — all of these things had gone, but the room itself had been changed by them forever.