Cold War Kids performing “Tuxedos” Live on KCRW
“What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?”
“Soon after the storm sunlight appeared and I continued on toward my ravens, noting that the lightning had hit a promontory of dune turning a patch into a glassy substance. My ears were still ringing when I thought I saw my father, perhaps fifty yards away, leading a group of girls who were dancing along the edge facing Lake Superior. My sister was close behind and there were six other girls I had known, three of whom had committed suicide, and three who had died in accidents or from cancer. My body felt hollow and I attributed this vision to the effect of close lightning strikes, the electricity in the air prodding an unused part of my brain. The group headed down the face of the dunes and disappeared into the water. At that moment I realized how often I was a vulnerable, fragile, and frightened man who wondered so deeply how he got from there to here, the questionable nature of the arc or trajectory that accumulates its energy when we are so young and then we are carried with it despite the presumed control over the character we have constructed moment by moment.”
“Each experienced, as everyone does sooner or later, the great unanswerable questions that only get asked in solitude and silence, when the fuss and clatter of daily life suddenly falls silent and “the party’s splendour fell to the floor.” …
Yet for anyone who has ever known, even in a crowded room, the solitude and darkness that Clarissa and Oedipa enter for a few moments, that experience, however brief and elusive, is “another mode of meaning behind the obvious” and, however obscured behind corruption, lies, and chatter, “a thing there was that mattered.”
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