As I sat at Gage’s feet—black light hurting my eyes, listening against my will to the perverse whispers of Bryan Ferry—I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don’t really last and don’t really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life. But, then again, maybe not.

As soon as I got home from Gage’s, I threw on the record I longed to hear. Listening, I reconsidered my earlier despair—no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn’t random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren’t wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what it is you find beautiful, right now, this second.