Taipei Story

She was Chinese American, and her folks were from the mainland, around Shanghai. «But Taiwan was easier to get to without a visa. It's the first time the boys have come anywhere in Asia. We wanted them to have a better idea of where they were from». There was no sense in which any of us were from Taiwan, but I understood her point. So they were just like me, using Taiwan as an entry point to the imperial core.

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.