How was the memorial reading of David Rakoff's novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish? Well, it was a lot of things. Packed. Polite. Emotional. 62 readers, so many of them fine...some of them family. (How did they get through it?)
And then there was this:
As it happened, Ira Glass was two people ahead of me in the readers' line, and he joined the line late, and he was fiddling with a mini iPad until he got something right. And then, in the middle of Ira reading David's work, he hit something on the iPad...and it was David, reading David's work.
This is what our age will be, among other things: we will never be able to forget the sound of a beloved's voice. A man will tap on a small screen, and a big room will fill with the slight rasp of a dying man reading a passage about another dying man.
And because everyone in the big room has come to hear David's work, hearing his actual voice? Just plain slays us.
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