What if, past a certain point, it weren’t
so bad to die? What if it were like
lying on a couch at 3:00 a.m.,
the mind aloft and quiet, given over
to a few piano notes finding ways
melodically through predetermined loops
in Brian Eno’s Music for Airports?
That’s what you’d be listening to,
music for those places where we go
to go away, the music of going away,
and you just disappearing into it
without effort or pain,
finding peace in knowing to obey
means at its root only to listen.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 Number 1, on page 31
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