The Caretaker: Everywhere At The End Of Time

Somewhere beyond the last remembered melody, a room is waiting for us to remember that no human being belongs entirely to memory. Its confines continue to breathe long after the drywall of experience has surrendered to oblivion, while the invisible inhabitants of its past move through one another with the exquisite indifference of ghosts who have misplaced the circumstances of their deaths. Perhaps memory has always been an elaborate misunderstanding between presence and disappearance, a clandestine negotiation through which consciousness persuades itself that what has passed remains available for retrieval. We inhabit the ruins of our own becoming, adorning their corridors with images whose origins grow increasingly illegible, trusting in the fragile hospitality of recognition to shelter us from the terrifying possibility that our lives have already begun to forget us. Music offers a particularly seductive refuge from this predicament. Its repetitions confer upon transience the…