...a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

-Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I can't speak to his life. I neither knew him nor met him nor likely can even claim so much as a third degree of association. And anyway, who can speak truly and completely of the horror, sublimity, and beauty of even their most intimate friend?

However, for me, as perhaps for others, his work will return again and again, evoking in words more solid and durable than the stone of a continental plate, the fluttering of a startled moth and the weak strains of piano and violin rising from a room below.