Taipei Story

Schopenhauer argued that music was the highest of all the arts, because it did not try to represent any ideas from the material world. Painting and sculpture and poetry were mere shadows of reality, just approximations of ideas, but music was pre-language, pre-association. Only music captured the Will.

The seconds slowed to a trickle, and I had resigned myself to this liminal space, this hollowed-out feeling of having nothing to look forward to, but nothing to move on from. This felt purifying. Penance for not feeling the right kind of grief. I had to step out of time, outside routine and expectation, and see what that felt like. There was no shape to the day, only the silence, and its weight.