If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough -- you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ...And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song.
And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.
It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.
And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.
The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.
The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.
It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.
I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.