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I have just learned that a friend of mine has died. In the confusion of my response, I feel his presence like I have not for many years. It quickens my field of vision, there is delighted relief in just turning my head to see things, because I think that he is inert and darkened. I saw him last by chance seven years ago on a subway. I recall feeling defensive about something he had said, and that he was growing bald. Probably I did not think of him focally at all in these intervening years, aside from vaguely expecting that something more would come of our relationship someday. But now that his life has been enclosed by time and ended, all that he was and is to me comes flooding back over me: driving together across the country to school long ago, sleeping out beside the road in sleeping bags and awakening to see him talking to himself and pointing at the sky, telling him the next phonograph records I wanted to buy and pleased that he noted what I wanted him to, that Berlioz was included. I remember getting his letters, and his handwriting. Without his knowing it, I suppose, he helped me disclose my possibilities in the world.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9698-4_16

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