Marcel Proust said there’s nothing that convinces one more completely of the reality of The Outside World more than the difference between your idea of a person before you’ve met them and your experience of them when you meet. I often transfer this logic to another field and say that nothing convinces one more completely of the reality of Time more than the difference between one’s experience of the world in the moment right before a horse race begins and one’s experience of the moment after it’s over. Time seems more real.
In a similar vein: that the human remains of Julian Sands seem finally to have been found in an area near Mt. Baldy where he disappeared has me thinking about that twilight period anyone who gives a shit has been in while we’ve waited for news of his actual death, and how precisely different it is now that we KNOW he’s gone. I don’t intend to dwell on some self-dramatizing misery of the present. I didn’t even know the man (although he inspired my 20's and my 21-mile walk across LA). I’m going to focus on the undercooked stale grey attention of the immediate past: what it’s like to feel in your heart a person or a relationship or career is dead as a doornail but to stand in that knowing like a ghost who can’t leave; what it’s like to be uncertain in that particular way.
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