On how music is an intimation of death: “You start the song. . . and you know, even as you round the corner of the first verse, that it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes. All you can do is keep moving to it.”

Say a boy is born in a middle-class suburb of the large Midwestern metropolis of C. Say he is born in the year 1989. This is the last of years. This is the first of years. This is the year the walls come down and the webs come up.

 

This day, a nation turns out for its own wake. The air is raw, but scrubbed by last night’s rain. Sunday rises, red and protestant, over the Potomac.